How My Dumb Mobile Game Got 400k Downloads

so a few years ago I made a really dumb mobile game part frantic architect which ended up getting featured on the front page of the App Store and getting over 400,000 downloads I've been thinking about making a video about this for a while but I didn't do it because I'm not sure what the moral of the story is it's one of those events that you can spin it in different ways either I could talk about how I'm this really smart guy who got a bunch of people to download my game even though it sucked or I could talk about how I wasted a lot of time building something that's basically useless I did write an article about this back in 2017 but I feel like I didn't explain the full story very well and then the reddit commenters seem to get the impression that I'm just this sellout who made the game to make money but come on man that's like totally not true I made the game so then I can make this YouTube video several years later and make money from that this video is divided into two sections first I'll explain what happened I'll tell you how I came up with the idea for this game how I built the prototype in one day and my analytics for the installs and the revenue in the second section I'll explain the bigger picture of why my marketing strategy worked and how you can apply these ideas to other projects besides mobile games let's get started [Music] if you remember back in early 2014 everybody was playing flappy bird but indie developer Dong Nguyen who is apparently making $50,000 a day at some point from the in-game ads shortly afterwards a lot of other really simple casual mobile games started taking over the App Store and Google Play and people started calling these games hyper casual the defining features of these games is that they're extremely short repetitive and easy for anyone to understand basically the sole intention of these games is to show ads to brain-dead people like me it basically works like this [Music] well you suck at this game let me help you up I'll give you ten more lives if he down with this at first my hyper casual game started taking off I'd already been building games for a couple years so I thought oh this must be a great way to cash in on my skills I was totally wrong it's actually very hard to monetize because there's so much competition since these games are so easy to make and the user attention is very bad since nobody really likes these games that much so you don't make very much money per user but back then I wasn't thinking carefully about how to solve these problems I was just too tunnel visioning on researching the popular apps and trying to reverse engineer their success instead of building something that I actually wanted to use myself so I would scroll through the top hyper casual games on iOS and Android and I'll play them to try to get inspiration for my own ideas when I did this I noticed that these games usually have two companies showing up on the splash screen one is the game developer and the other is the publisher and most of the popular hyper casual games are actually published by the same few companies the biggest one right now is Vudu and their apps have more downloads than any other company in the world besides Facebook and Google the publishers help promote your game in three main ways social media ads cross promotion from other games in their network and helping your game get featured on Apple and Google these publishers would really sell developers like me on the fact that they had these inside contacts at Apple and Google so you would have a much better chance of getting featured if you work with them I don't know how much of this is actually true but these days you can actually just submit a form to Apple and request to get your game features so you should definitely try that out first but back then I was just really gullible and I liked the idea of working with a beer company and just made me feel more legit you know I didn't want to feel like just some dude making a game by myself I didn't do too much research into the tangible benefits of working with these publishers but the funny thing is that things actually turned out better than it should have given the kind of mindset that I had my strategy was to build a one game prototype after another and send them out to all the publishers and I would find these publishers just by looking through the top charts on Android in iOS I use the Unity game engine to build my games which I really like it's very easy to pick up and also very powerful the first prototype I made was hasty enemies and basically you're this blue guy and you're running around and trying to kill these red guys that are chasing you by running circles around them and having the body slam into each other and I know this is really weird and surprise surprise it didn't get accepted by any of the publishers but then I didn't notice a little bit later that one of the publishers ripped off my idea and made a better version of it and I can't really blame them I mean I'm pretty smart ii was super aquarium which i talked about of one of my older videos and i spent way too much time on this it was a month and a half of full-time effort while i was on summer break and again it was rejected by all the publishers i sent it to third is this game called square stack and it's basically a variation of the classic stacker arcade game where you have to match up the colors of the squares and this was also rejected by all the publishers finally i came up with the idea for a frantic architect while i was in a plane and i was watching some documentary about classical architecture the game design is based off of square stack plus another game that i worked on a few months before and i think sitting on the plane doing nothing and just watching that architecture documentary sort of helped me weld all those ideas together i built the prototype in one day and i include the source code in the description in case you're interested it's really simple you just tap anywhere on the screen to place down the glowing block and you have to grow your tower as big as possible without making it imbalanced unity handles all the physics so i mainly just had to code the placement of the blocks and then I checked the speed at which the tower is moving in order to determine if the thing is falling down and once it falls down the game restarts it's kind of like a metaphor for life you know it's not about how many times you fall but how many times you rise and get back up and watch my ad so I can get money to publishers offered me contracts for this and the one I accepted was from a company called bulky pix they're in France and they've actually released some good before they decided to pivot and work with shovelware developers like me the terms of the contract were terrible they basically offered me nothing in exchange for 50% of the revenue they did say that they would promote my game for one week after launch but to be honest I'm not really sure that they did that I got the contract in October 2015 and by now I was starting my last year of university so I was really busy with job interviews and studying I lost motivation to work on frantic architect pretty quickly I didn't think the game was very good to begin with it wasn't the kind of thing that I would play myself and then bulky pics asked me to implement a lot of really boring stuff like translating the text or designing some marketing graphics or adding achievements and leaderboards and things like that the more I worked on it the more I realized that this isn't a good use of my time and my main motivation for finishing it now was just to put something on my resume this is not very motivating so I procrastinate is super hard it took me six months to finish a game that I basically prototyped in one day the game was finally released in March 2016 and that day my product manager over at bulky picks Skyped me and said hey you know your app is featured worldwide on the front page of the app store this was super surprising to me because at this point all I knew was that they had pitched the game to Apple they didn't tell me how the meeting went and since I personally didn't think the game was very good I was very surprised that this happened over the next two weeks it got three hundred sixty-five thousand downloads and a plateau around 400,000 downloads I wasn't expecting to get this many users at launch but I also wasn't expecting the downloads to drop off this quickly I thought that if I had just built up enough awareness of the game I would get more organic insults but what ended up happening is I basically become irrelevant right after it dropped off of the top charts you can see that my ad revenue per day matches are pretty closely with my downloads per day and it wasn't surprised by this because I knew the user attention would be low but I was hoping that I would make more than a few thousand dollars considering that I had four hundred thousand people playing my game after game died I didn't put too much thought into it because I was busy with exams and job interviews but then a few weeks later I was really concerned because bulky pics wasn't sending me my ad payments and they were also ignoring all my emails then one other developer who was also working with them reached out to me and he said that he wasn't getting paid either two months later I found out that bulky pics went bankrupt and I didn't get paid a single penny but this wasn't actually an important part of this story because by this point I had already decided that I wasn't gonna be making any more hyper casual games before I explain this further I want to show you the bigger picture for why this genre of games took over the App Store [Music] there are two key advantages that hyper casual game developers try to exploit first of all because these games are so simple to make they can build them very quickly Vudu launches a new game every couple of days and by doing this they can test their ideas and gather data much faster than other kinds of game developers I think that a lot of startups in general can learn from Voodoo's ruthless focus on launching new products second the audience for these games are very broad because they're so simple and easy to understand but this is a double-edged sword the flipside is that nobody really likes these games that much so the user attention is very low in addition to low user attention very few players will buy anything in these games so they're relying on ads to make money but according to an article on VentureBeat 60% of the ads on hyper casual games are actually just promoting other hyper casual games so if you think about it for this 60 percent of the ads the industry is actually not generating any money it's just the companies within it exchanging money with each other the reason the industry can sustain itself is because the other 40% of the ads is so to brands and other mobile game genres the main argument for the growth of the hyper casual genre is that is introducing non-gamers to games so the advertising space is very valuable to these other mobile game genres for example let's say that the first game I ever plan my life is flappy bird and the inside flappy bird I see an ad for more hardcore game like Angry Birds and then I'm like oh maybe I'll check it out the main problem with all of this in my opinion is that eventually people are going to realize that playing these games is an extremely unfulfilling experience it's already much harder to get people to download your app now compared to a few years ago and the standards for app quality is just getting higher and higher eventually I think some game developer will figure out how to make a very good game that actually appeals to a broad audience of non gamers and I don't know what this game is gonna look like but I think that when it comes out it's gonna change the entire industry I think that ten years from now people are gonna be looking at the hyper casual games from these last few years and they're gonna think wow why would anybody want to play that it's kind of like how we see those old bad TV shows from the 90s with a lot of commercials in them if there's one thing that you should take away from all this is that you shouldn't be afraid to build something just because there's a big company in the space Vudu just raised 200 million dollars and apparently they test out three to four hundred games every month but somehow everything they make is crap that was inspired by this one dude in Vietnam who made one popular game in a few days there are a ton of indie games released ten or more years ago that are still fun and relevant today but how many of you use games will anyone remember ten years from now you might argue that the whole business is built to capitalize on a trend and whoever's running the show is gonna be so rich in ten years that they're not gonna care what happens to the company but if you take a deeper look at the numbers the estimated total revenue for all of Voodoo's apps in September 2019 was only $500,000 according to sensor tower and considering that they had to pay for a lot of their 77 billion downloads that month and considering that they have to pay off their 194 employees this company is definitely losing money and at the end of the day would you rather be the dude in this suit who pretends to know what he's doing when he's actually just throwing a bunch of darts on the wall and hoping that something sticks or would you rather be the dude in his room who made one popular game that he thought was cool and ended up changing industry forever that's it for me thanks for watching and I'll see you the next one [Music]

Channel: Will Kwan

Views: 1,297,357

Keywords: game development, game dev, hypercasual, mobile game, unity, mobile game publisher, voodoo, app store, indie game, game design, app development, mobile app, app marketing, indie game marketing

Id: zkIfCo2JxJY

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DemoEvolved]

I had a hard time clicking the link to watch the video but I’m glad I did. Was expecting something about a smug designer who thought he had something clever, but actually found a guy that spent 6 months to make $2500 in revenue off 400k installs that he never got paid out for. The bleakness of the results is actually really accurate and op does not mince words about it. He reveals the terribleness of maso core hypercasual games that get pushed by media influencers who are just trying to fill hours so they can sell their own twitch ads and subs. Flappy did well because pewdiepie used it to generate schadenfreude for his audience and a bunch of little kids in his audience installed it and it made a culture zeitgeist wave.

[u/nomadthoughts]

Very interesting story and approach. I've focused my career in interpersonal clients, choosing those with better ideas (in my mind at least), and I've tried to help other clients to achieve their ideas and make them into products.

The state of the mobile games industry is very troubling because quality games are few and apart, as the video creator said, they just shoot darts and see what sticks. Spoiler alert: Nothing does, because those aren't real EXPERIENCES. They're only minigames. A minigame won't have any long lasting appeal, unless it's very lucky, well placed, or REALLY fun. Again, since there is no real game design beyond "well, the pipe is coming, tap to avoid it", there's a very low possibility of those things happening.

All in all, very thought provoking video. Thanks for sharing.

[u/RexDraco]

I'd want the guy to make more hypercasual games just so he'd make more videos about it. He was actually entertaining as well informative.

[u/keller112]

Hypercasual games have their place, IMO. They existed for a long time before the mobile market made them popular again. In the 90s and early 00s, there were these god-awful chinese portable games ( which the filthy casuals who bought them for thier kids called tetrises, even though the games weren't tetris ) with 6x12 LCD screens that had one game each, and they were all really simple mechanically and also graphically. It fills that exact niche. It's weirdly the same reason those infernal things were called tetrises in the first place - Tetris is the original game filled that niche.

Now we just have advanced graphics and an existing device for the same type of gameplay. Super Hexagon is a brilliant example of a hypercasual game and it's flipping great, but that's because Terry Cavanaugh had the decency to add clear steps of progress and an ending, and spend a bit more than a few days making the core gameplay it feel great.

[u/LoneWolfRanger1]

Awesome video. Loved it

[u/SirToxe]

This was a really good video.

[u/Limpert]

Hi, thanks for the video and sorry to hear it worked out that way!

But the part where you said that Voodoo made only 250k in a month might not be correct.

Sensor Tower can't estimate ad revenue. Only revenue from IAP and subscriptions.

Source (Sensor Tower employee answered a question): https://www.quora.com/How-does-Sensor-Tower-revenue-estimate-work

[u/TheMindfulGeek]

You mentioned the possibility for an actually good hypercasual game that would appeal to both gamers and non-gamers. Would the game Badlands fit your description? It only has one control(tap, just like flappy bird), but the depth is incredibly, and the puzzles are actually quite challenging at later levels. Even the aesthetic is minimal, mostley black with a barren background. I know it changed my view of games, because of how much they accomplished with so little.