I’ve mentioned this before – Neil Rajah is quite popular in India, and not so much anywhere else in the world. To put this in perspective, here are the new user counts for the top 5 countries:
- India – 4,139
- US – 624
- Russia – 597
- France – 347
- Germany – 273
Flurry reports a total of 9584 new users, so India accounts for almost half.
What I hadn’t realized is that this is also affecting my ad revenue. I sent an email to Mobclix asking them about the low per-click revenue that I’m seeing in Neil Rajah. They said that this was mostly because the majority of ad requests were from India, and the ads in that region don’t pay as much as the US and Europe. In hindsight, this makes sense.
So the question is, how do I make the game more popular in the US and Europe 
I made some changes to the Google Play store description to de-emphasize the ‘based on Indian mythology’ theme, and position it as more of a traditional platformer, but so far that hasn’t made much of a difference. However, the game is still growing, so there is hope. It reached #150 in ‘Top New Free’ for ‘Arcade and Action’ yesterday (today it’s back down to 153). Also, Distimo is starting to show ranking data for a few more countries, and those are mostly improving as well (except for Ireland, not sure why the Irish don’t like this game ).
It would be an interesting experiment to reskin it with a different (more “Western”) theme and a new name and put it up as another app.
Heh, that would be interesting. I’d probably have to release it as a different developer though, or I’d get a bunch of “This is just a copy of Neil Rajah” reviews
I second this suggestion. Preferably give it a military theme too. Successful examples of 2D and 3D dungeon runners have often had the person doing the dungeon running as one of the following:
– boy whose mom was stolen by aliens
– ex-marine
– etc
This is where I should make a BS speech about “That’s the beauty of being indie, I can make games about whatever I want… I’m doing it for the experience, not the money…” etc.
Frankly, the Indian mythology theme was one of the fundamental ideas when I started the game, and I had expected that there was a chance that it might not be popular in the US. I’m not really bothered by it. My next game probably won’t have such a niche theme, and I’ve developed a pretty good engine in the process that I can re-use in future projects. So it’s not really a loss.
Also, the game is still growing. It’s making 1.5x – 2x what Bus Jumper makes, and it’s still climbing in rank (I think it hit 136 today for ‘top new free’ in ‘action / arcade’, and it’s picking up 500-600 new users a day. It didn’t have anywhere close to the big initial splash that Bus Jumper had, and that’s because of ‘Just In’, but so far, I’m happy with the progress. Also, hopefully the most recent update will finally pass Amazon’s testing for the Kindle Fire. It’ll be interesting to see how many downloads I get on that.
I think that is much easier way to remove banner ads and to implement TapJoy with out middle man like Swarm or to leave banner ads but in combination with TapJoy. Obviously is ridiculous to expect any revenue from banners unless you do not have thousands of users in Western countries, that lead us to conclusion that banners can not be the main source of revenue for the title with small user base. I’d love to see how offer walls (appBrain) or TapJoy perform on small base.
Yeah, with Swarm, the user earns coins when they complete TapJoy offers, and the developer earns money when the user spends coins in their game. So it’s an indirect revenue source, and of course the conversion rate will be lower. I spent some time reading through the TapJoy website, I might look into integrating something like that directly.