I'm surprised this game hasn't earned you enough to retire on. It's been #1 on the paid list for a long time, I figured you guys must be rolling in the dough, but in the article it says you would need to repeat the success of the game every year for you to quit your day job. That's unbelievable.
How can flappy birds be making $50k per day, and your #1 paid app only makes $2k per day?
We've had 630k downloads to date. 30% goes to Apple. Michael and I split the rest. From my half, the IRS gets 45%. So my net so far is $120k.
Now, given that we're no where near the #1 spot, we're averaging about $1,000 a day. But that figure is dropping too. ADR is a depreciating asset with a life span of two years I'd say (making this assumption based on what I've seen with other paid apps and their rank history).
Wow, I'm shocked at how less frequently paid apps are downloaded. Don't get me wrong, 630k downloads of a paid app is very impressive, but it's ridiculous that you only make ~$100k out of the deal.
Do you have any statistics on how far players have made it in your game? I, for one, downloaded the game just to see what it was about. This is not my type of game, so I quit after only playing about 10 minutes.
Reason I ask is that you could test this out as a freemium app. Free to download, but after a certain period, the user has to pay to continue.
Let's say 20% of people that download it are hooked. If you get 20x the download rate on free, that means you could have a 400% increase in revenue. It might be worth testing out.
We didn't want to break the immersion. ADR simply wants to be that game you pay for one time up front and enjoy (hopefully). No strings attached. We simply request that you gift the game to someone else if you like it :-)
We thought about it, but the moment you do that, the game is marked as "offers in-app purchases". At initial glance (if you don't take the time to actually look at what purchases are available), you're left thinking that it's "yet another game that'll present a pay wall when I'm about to finish it".
Everybody says that flappy birds was making $50k/day, but I highly doubt that the game would have been pulled from the appstore if it really had been making even 1/10th that much money a day.
We made ADR free for two days back when it wasn't doing well. In that two day period we received ~15k downloads (and we weren't even a ranked game at the time).
There is an order of magnitude difference between the downloads rates for premium vs free apps (probably 2x). So it is entirely possible that a top ranked free app gets a ton of downloads a day relative to a top ranked paid app.
Lots of downloads, yes - but I don't know what kind of person could turn down $50,000/day, which is what a lot of people have claimed flappy birds was making when it was pulled off the AppStore.
Tough call. I get a small taste of what he went through. You start to question the value of the game when you get reviews like this (but 10x worse for a top free game):
>Garbage ★ by XxlCraiglxX - Version 1.6 - Jun 13, 2014
>It's so nice to have this hive-mind community full of hipsters and morons raving about the worst goddamn games. Same thing happened with Angry Birds and Flappy Birds. You people are disgusting. Horrible unwashed masses of brainless consumers. Hey morons, take a step back and really consider the piece of crap you rated 5 stars. No, really, just take a moment.
The entire experience has been a roller coaster. Every time ADR hits a top spot, I dream about a future where I don't have to work a 9-5. But then it drops, and those dreams are taken away. That being said, 50k a day would definitely bring me to that goal quickly (just not the case for me).
Regarding Reviews - you can always smile (giggle? :-) at those responses given that you have (thousands of?) people like me, who has played games on every platform for 15+ years, has a very generous budget and has a pretty good portion of the AAAs by my console, but found ADR (on the web) to be one of my top 10 games in the last couple years, probably behind Jelly Defense and Don't Starve, but definitely ahead of GTA V in terms of sheer visceral pleasure.
The Apple Bar Geniuses at the Store in Palo Alto all loved it as well.
I hope just one of our heartfelt loves can equal at least a thousand haters, who, as we all know, just gotta hate. :-)
All the nice reviews do indeed raise spirits. The most wonderful moments are when I get an email from a kid that is now inspired to get into programming and start building games. So yes, thank you for the kinds words! :fistbump:
It was definitely soul crushing the first 100 times. The UK is particularly critical. I've gotten used to seeing "dull, rubbish, pretentious, scam" from UK reviews. Still stings just a little bit though.
We wanted to add more to the game, but at some point you have to pull back on your urge to tack on more things. So from that standpoint ADR is done.
If your rank is low, release, and release often. Don't sweat the reviews (use them as a means to gain feedback from the people who've downloaded the game). You can also make your app free for a couple of days which will bring in new eyes (you lose your rank if you do that, so just be aware).
As for being a top ranked app (and in my case, a top ranked app that lives and dies by its reviews), I really can't release a new version unless I add something that significantly increases end user engagement.
For example: v1.5 of the game hit the number one spot, and dropped to #2 18 days later. The moment it dropped I released v1.6 of the game which added developer commentary from me and Michael. We went back to #1 for 2 days after a week long slump. That being said, I compared numbers after the fact and our review conversion rates only increased by ~0.2%.
Sudden increase in downloads started in UK. Any ideas at all as to age profile of the downloaders? I'm guessing 19-14 University students, although that is based on a hunch from the desire for verbal engagement and fiction reading preferences of the students I teach...
For the US, I think the age profile are kids in middle school and high school. Just from what I've heard from my friends, the game spread like wild fire through schools. This is my current working theory especially since the game dropped significantly in rank the moment summer started.
I was about to mention the holidays. Excellent, perhaps they will be back for more. A bit of reasoning and verbal gymnastics might actually help cognitive development!
this is totally unrelated but you know you have a "clone" on android? more broadly your game is very hard to clone because it is very heavily content based...unlike other hits which are easy to mimic because based on a simple game engine...what are your thoughts about this? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appslight....
Legally, they have every right to do this. This clone doesn't bother me because it's free and looks like it doesn't monetize on ads either (they just PhoneGap'ed the game and made it playable on touch devices). There is a serious gray area now with regards to ADR's trademark and brand (and developers taking advantage of the open source version/brand for personal gain).
