Partly out of boredom and partly out of curiosity, I decided to compare some performance metrics between Neil Rajah and Bus Jumper. These numbers are from April 21st through the 28th.
Bus Jumper | Neil Rajah | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Users | 2691 | 3173 | ||
| Active Users | 8164 | 6204 | ||
| Sessions | 11770 | 12178 | ||
| Total Time (hours) | 1042 | 437 |
What can I infer from this data?
- Neil Rajah is growing faster than Bus Jumper. That seems reasonable, since it’s a newer game. What’s a little disappointing is that vast majority of the users are still coming from India. Which is a huge market, so that’s not an issue, but I wish I could get American and European users interested in trying out the game. I made some changes to the description to try and de-emphasize the ‘Indian mythology’ aspect in the store listing, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference.
- People are spending much longer playing Bus Jumper. I suspect this is because people fire up the game, play a level once or twice, die, and then quit. The data on levels completed vs. died would back that up – over that same time period, I saw 5000 ‘level finished’ events, and 28000 ‘level died’ events. The good news is, it looks like people enjoy the challenge, and keep re-trying. But I wonder if I’ve made the game too hard? I could make all levels unlocked from the start of the game. Would that result in more engagement? Or would people get bored and stop playing? I could also make this a purchaseable upgrade. I’ll have to think about that.
You’re probably thinking, all of that’s fine, but the real question is, how is it doing financially? And that is a difficult question to answer. For one, I turned off all ads in Bus Jumper during the last month, and just ran an ad for Neil Rajah. That got about a 5% click-through rate, which is ironic, because that’s much higher than the CTR I see for regular ads. So Bus Jumper income for last month is zero. On the Neil Rajah side, a couple of days after I released the game, Mobclix put up an announcement saying that they’re having trouble with revenue reporting. So the numbers I see on the dashboard now are probably bogus, and I don’t know when they will be updated.
Here’s what I can see – the interstitial ads seem to be doing better than the banner ads, based purely on CTR. I get about 3-5% CTR on those, while the banner ads get about 1%. However, the income numbers that I’m seeing right now are pathetic – about half a cent per click. I’m hoping that’s the data reporting problem, and not what I’m actually earning per click. I’ve heard that April is traditionally a bad month for ad revenue, but hopefully it’s not this bad.
Other useful / interesting Neil Rajah data:
- I haven’t had a single purchase in the Swarm store yet. I wonder how much of this is because of the user distribution across countries – I know $1 is more expensive in India than it is in the US
- I’ve made 60 cents from the LeadBolt offer wall. When someone clicks on it and downloads an app, the payout is decent, much better than a banner ad click. But without making this more ‘in your face’, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. I could throw up a ‘get more apps’ dialog box when the user exits the game. How annoying would that be? Everyone else who’s having good success with LeadBolt seems to be using their push notification ads, and they’re reporting that people aren’t really complaining. Should I go there? I remember the backlash and negative comments around AirPush that made the news some months back
- I submitted Neil Rajah to the NOOK app store. I’ve heard that the approval process involves a lot of red tape, so we’ll see how it goes. They don’t allow ads, so I priced the ad-free version at $1.99. Like I said, we’ll see
- I fixed the issues with the background music, and re-submitted the game to Amazon. Hopefully it will get approved for the Kindle Fire soon. Based on my downloads so far, I would say that no one besides Fire owners are using the Amazon app store
- I’m probably going to release some kind of ad-free version to the Google and Amazon stores. Not quite sure how to handle this, since I suspect users won’t want to start again from level 1. I’m leaning towards an ‘unlocker’ app, and the main game app checks to see if the unlocker is installed. There are multiple ways to achieve this, and I’m doing some research into what would be the easiest
I do not trust when developers claim that there is no negative feedback on push notifications and I would never suggest someone to put them. On other hand I would like to see some numbers and feedback from trusted developer like you but I stay on my previous statement about them.
I think you did not create “good” conditions, under that I mean that you need to create such conditions that people NEED to generate a currency if they want to continue playing. For example, the world can be unlocked only if you spent gold and gold can be generated only if you fulfill some offer (download some game etc.). I suggest you to try AppBrain app wall some developers whose blogs I follow say that they generate solid revenue from AppBrain. And personally I would be more aggressive with the app wall offers, but that’s just me and my 2 cents about this problem.
You’re right, for the first release, I wanted all the content in the game to be unlockable through playing the game, and the intent for the Swarm coins was just to allow someone to short-circuit the game if they want. I did have some thoughts about adding ‘premium’ content that can only be purchased. And I’d probably do that through the Swarm store, since that allows 3rd party app stores to work, and it’s much easier than setting up Google’s IAP.
I’ve heard good things about AppBrain too. Deciding how aggressive to be with ad offers is always a difficult decision