My game publishing experience on Google Play (7) -- Another peak!

    Finally there is another interesting topic for my post. Our app reaches another peak at Nov 11th without any indication.
 

    I'd really like to know what was the reason for the burst, but sadly I failed to be a good observer. ( Please let me know if you're a brilliant detective) However, still I have something to share:

"Our app has a substantial fall of download count since Nov. 17"

   What's the reason for the fall? Recall what we'd discussed earlier in the Google Play Ranking. We're ranked 37th in the Arcade & Action Top New Free Chart Egypt (Source: App Annie) in Nov. 16th, but fell out of the rank list in 17th. Why? We're not NEW anymore since then. As mentioned in my older post, "new" apps are those published in previous 30 days. Nov. 16th is the 31st day since our app is published, and due to the vanishing in a chart where we're standing out, the download count falls. We have a substantial fall in Nov. 17th, and in Nov 18th, the fall is further multiplied since the fall on the day before degrade our performance on other "non-new" charts.

    What's the indication? Developers should fully utilize the first month in market and try to reach high rank in "non-new" charts to keep the momentum in the following months. In other words, do whatever you can to sprint in the first month.

    So I guess this might suggest the end of this series, since seemingly there may be no big difference in the future performance of our game for we're not planning to buy and commercails. I might made some conclusion on my observation when November's monthly report is available in my next post. See you guys then!

This is a series sharing my publishing and cooperating experience on Google Play game.
 Last Post: First Monthly Revenue Report
Next Post: In Progress

My game publishing experience on Google Play (6) -- First Monthly Revenue Report

    Finally we obtained the access to our ad-revenue back-end. We are notified that from now on, in the beginning of each month, we'll receive the revenue report of the preceding month. The earnings would be actually paid in the next month.

    So here's the table of our earnings:

Day#	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
US$	0.1	4.5	4.4	7.1	16	4.9	1.3	2.9	1	0.5	0.6	0.7	1	0.8	1.3

    Furthermore, I guess it's a good timing to investigate the relationship between downloads and earnings:

Figure 1: Earning (US$) vs Downloads (times)

Definitions:
Daily Installs- Number of devices that had downloaded our app today.

Current Installs- Number of devices that currently had our app installed.

    Obviously, neither daily installs nor current installs is a good enough estimator for the revenue. Thus I made up a model assuming only α: [1,0] players who installed on day n would contribute to the revenue on day n+1.

    Thus we could model the estimator to revenue with the Exponential Weighted Moving Average of the daily download. The error sum is minimized when α = .45 (Sum =7.3), obviously better than the other two estimators above (Sum=16.8 for Daily and Sum =22 for Current)

    What does the analysis above indicates? It reveals that nearly half of our user lost their interest to our game after a day! We really should take some efforts on the retention rate.

This is a series sharing my publishing and cooperating experience on Google Play game.
 Last Post: App's ranking in Google Play
Next Post: Another peak!

My game publishing experience on Google Play (5) -- App's ranking in Google Play

   An year ago when I was excited about our old app's first launch, I found an app analytic tool with marvelously beautiful user interface, which happened to be App Annie. However, not until recently when our App reaches Rank 500 in some specific countries did I realized what App Annie shows us.

    App Annie records the full country rank charts on app markets, which frees you from repeatedly changing your phone setting and manually scroll-through the whole chart. In addition, it keeps track of the history rank of each app, which are not shown in your Google Play back-end.

    Following is an example of our app's performance:

Figure 1. The statistic of our app shown on App Annie, Oct 5, 2013.

    As you may already know, there are six charts on Google Play:

1. Top Paid
2. Top Free
3. Top Grossing
4. Top New Paid *1
5. Top New Free *1
6. Trending

    App Annie provides all of above excepts "6. Trending". My guess is App Annie doesn't show it since it is not a strongly ordered list.

    *1 "New" is for apps that are published in last 30 days.

This is a series sharing my publishing and cooperating experience on Google Play game.
 Last Post: First Week on Google Play
Next Post: First Monthly Revenue Report

My game publishing experience on Google Play (4) -- First Week on Google Play

    So here's the first performance evaluation. I'll make a comparison between the first 10 days of our old game which we published an year ago (2012/9/30) and the new game (2013/10/17) :

Figure 1. Comparison of first ten days performance.

Table 1. Downloads in the first ten days.

	Day#	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Old	Daily Installs	12	17	10	2	5	1	7	7	6	10
	Total Installs	12	29	40	42	47	48	55	62	68	78
New	Daily Installs	64	2749	1947	2163	2012	254	116	128	137	135
	Total Installs	64	2813	4760	6923	8935	9189	9305	9433	9570	9705

Definitions:
Daily Installs- Number of devices that had downloaded our app today.

Total Installs- Number of distinct devices that once had our app installed.

    Obviously, the difference in number of total installs is enormous. Actually our new game's download figure has surpassed our old one in merely 4 days. (The old one is on market for more than a year.)

    However, it is worth to discuss that there is some weird drop on the 6th day. The drop is so sharp that we actually have only about 1/10 downloads that day compared to the day before. My current guess is our distributor had the conclusion that our game is not performing good enough and decided to lower our exposure. Another possible reason is the target customers have already sufficiently aware of our games and thus there is no new downloads, this guess is probably wrong since the fall is just too sharp, though. Anyway, we'll just need to wait and see.

    P.S. our main downloads are currently from Iraq, Egypt, and Kuwait.

This is a series sharing my publishing and cooperating experience on Google Play game.
 Last Post: The Partnership
Next Post: App's ranking in Google Play

My game publishing experience on Google Play (3) -- The Partnership

    As I've mentioned in Introduction, our studio, DumDumApps, have decided to push our game RocketER to more exposure by cooperating with some distributors. The distributors we're working with is not enormous publishers like Chilingo. (According to our contract, we cannot reveal our partnership publicly so I'm not going to mention much about them, but I guess if you're really interested, it's Ok to ask me via mail.) Rather, the relation between our partner and us is simple:

    We design the game and they'll promote them. Since we are making free games, we'll use the ad network they provides and split our revenues according to our agreement.

    The percentage we share is approximately 50%, which is the average figure all companies asking for cooperation have offered. (Note that the exact percentage we're having in our contract may be different.) That's quite some amount for pure marketing but we decided to accept the deal since we're currently students and are just planning to know the market rather than really make some money. Exposure is what we really cares.

    I'm going to briefly go through the process we've been through in this post.

2012/09/30:
    First commercial-free app is published in Google Play
2013/06/09:
    An invitation of cooperation is sent from some marketing team asking to buy our code with $500~$1000
2013/06/17:
    The same team offered another proposal: cooperating and splitting revenue.
2013/06/25
    We replied to the team, but no further communication since then.
2013/08/28
    Another team has again suggested cooperation.
2013/08/31
    Frequently conf-call via Skype this week discussing cooperation details.
2013/09/06
    Started integration of ad network SDK & preparing documents.
2013/09/18
    Finished merging their SDK in our apk and signed Contract via Internet by scanner. Now is our turn to await for testing and translations...etc.
2013/10/17
    Received the finalized apk along with some translated slogans / app details and published it.

This is a series sharing my publishing and cooperating experience on Google Play game.
 Last Post: Brief of RocketER
Next Post: First Week on Google Play
   

My game publishing experience on Google Play (2) -- Brief of RocketER

   RocketER is the cooperating game case in this series of post, so I decided to give a brief introduction just in case someone would like to know.

(Left: Discharge of Pluto, Right: emitting Blizzard weapon)

    There're two modes in RocketER.

    In the single game, rockets fall from the top and your mission is to intercept them before they destroy your planet.
 
    As you intercept rockets, your energy bar would charge and you'll be able to shake your device or tap the "Pluto" icon to emit special weapons.
 
   The goal of this game is to defend as long as you can and in the meanwhile achieve high scores.

(Left: The Rocket Choosing Menu, Right: Multi Game

    Multi mode requires two players, one at the top of the device and another at the bottom. After each player chooses three rockets from the list, the game begins.

    The game zone is divided equally into two parts. Each player can tap on the enemy's rocket in its zone or tap on the void to emit a single rocket toward enemy.

    The chosen rockets could be use every once a while to overpower the opponent.


This is a series sharing my publishing and cooperating experience on Google Play game.
 Last Post: Series Introduction
Next Post: The Partnership

My game publishing experience on Google Play (1) -- Series Introduction

Scratch - the origin of our later
game Rocketer.

    During Spring 2012, Hsueh-fan, David and I registered for the course "Mobile Application Development and Project" at NCTU. We have been team-working since Spring 2011 on our undergraduate thesis (An Android tool for fridge) and already had some experience in Android app developing, so we had decided to do something cooler than utility apps, such as games during this lesson.

    David took the first step among us. He made a simple tapping game "Scratch" which is modified from the Android SDK example Lunar Lander. This game was quite a success, so we decided to give up our original plans and focus on the improvements we could make in "Scratch".

    We then added the best idea of the app --  multiple play in the final presentation, including some minor UI improvements. We won some applause and decided to attend TIDCA Game Developing Contest 2012. The contest requires us to upload our works on Google Play, and thus we started DumDumApps. You can download the latest version of our game RocketER if you like to.

    About an year after we uploaded our games. We received several mails from third party distributors. After some brief discussion, we recognized that there is nothing to lose from cooperating. After some dull contracting processes, we managed to cooperate on our old content with one of the distributors.

    RocketER is a game which support multi-play on single device. A month after our cooperation, I feel like there are some thoughts, just like what I've read an year ago from Making Money with Android, that I would like to share. This would be the beginning of the series of posts.

    The full series:
    (2) Brief of Rocketer
    (3) The Partnership
    (4) First week on Google Play
    (5) App's ranking in Google Play
    (6) First Monthly Revenue Report
    (7) Another Peak!