I'm interested in finding a good return-on-investment for a very small marketing budget. I've thrown some money at FB ads, but I was paying $1 per click. Most people won't install the game after clicking the ad, and an even smaller fraction are going to actually pay for it.
I really need to fix the beta web version, all the animations and UI are still pretty bad. The android version also has some bugs and crashes I need to fix.
The other problem is my app store listings, because they were very rushed. I don't think my screenshots are very good, and I need to make a trailer video.
My last big marketing idea is to write up a blog post about the things I learned with React Native, and post that on Reddit and Hacker News. I'm not sure what I can do after that. I might create a boilerplate project, or even open source the whole game, but that would be a last resort.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Anyways, here's some of my thoughts/questions:
How many people have you had play and test the game? Of those people, how many would fit your target market of Sudoku or Tetris players? What kind of feedback have you been given? When you say people "seem to enjoy playing it", how are you judging that? My warning sirens go off if I hear someone say "It's cool" or something equivalently generic or brief.
What kind of analytics do you have in your game (e.g. Flurry)? Even though you may not have a lot of users, what do your retention numbers look like? My last company (Backflip Studios) put out a few puzzle games and what we found was that the players that stick around are very dedicated and hardcore (and typically skew older). If you aren't retaining even a few users like this, you need to consider that your game is simply not appealing or you do not yet have enough users to draw conclusions.
Your only monetization method besides ads is to remove them. We tried that strategy as far back as the original Paper Toss, and even with millions of daily active users we barely had income from it. That trend never changed over the years or with new games. Ads can make you decent money, but only when you have a lot of users.
Given your monetization strategy, you will absolutely hemorrhage money if you try and buy users, especially from Facebook. There are other ad networks that are more mobile focused that you might try buying users from if you are willing to buy their crappier inventory.
I would also not rely on a blog post generating any meaningful traffic or sales, though it certainly can't hurt to try -- it's also fun just to share knowledge.
All that said, I will not bullshit you: The odds of this game generating you any meaningful amount of income are very low. Mobile in general is a brutal market and your game does not really stand out visually when viewed in the app store. If your analytics for retention are in the double digits, by all means keep trying to improve the game and market it. At some point however you may need to consider it a learning experience and move on the next project.
I will be redoing the tutorial to make it. That's a good idea about asking the player to drag the first piece, instead of just showing an animation.
I've had around 1,000 people play the game. My favorite feedback so far from was a guy who really enjoyed the game, so he shared it with his father and sister, and now his whole family are playing. But yeah, I also got a lot of "it's cool", which I don't pay too much attention to.
For analytics, I'm using Fabric Answers and Firebase Analytics. Here are some of the stats from iOS: https://imgur.com/a/8zz15
Those retention numbers look really bad, but I can't say I'm surprised. I'm also pretty happy that I made $50 from IAPs, because I've never got this far before.
Maybe my next project should be an RPG or "farming" game that you keep coming back to every day.
I agree that my monetization strategy is not great, but I don't want to advantage of people with purchases for "bags of coins" and stuff like that. But maybe that's the only way to get ahead?
I can understand that your game with millions of DAU might not be able to support a game studio with salaried employees, but if I extrapolate my own numbers then millions of users would be bringing in tons of money for a solo developer. That would be something like $60k USD, which I wouldn't complain about!
In the end, many indies are bad at making games (coding, design) partly because they're inexperienced, but almost all of them are bad at business (marketing, advertising, hiring, finance, strategy).
It's probably important to separate indie studios from "indie games" the genre, which is more about artistic or retro style games that target a more traditional gaming audience. Common themes involve getting featured in the app stores and in traditional gaming media outlets, 'superstar' developers, and very specific genres and art styles. If you want to reliably succeed in this genre you probably want to have a very public social media presence and try to make friends who are on the app review boards or are editors of various publications.
I've never had an app featured in any sort of major store and I don't do tons of UA, I just build solid games and focus on organic growth and exposure. For instance, the first decision I make when it comes to a new game is picking a visual/marketing theme, naming, pre-positioning for keywords, etc. Then I build a solid game that monetizes. Of course, I take into account how long the game will take to build, how difficult it will be to maintain, cost of assets, etc etc too. It helps to reuse game engines to reduce build time and complexity. You know, the kinds of absolutely regular business decisions you make in the course of running any business. It's actually a lot more boring than you'd think making games would be!
Many "indie game" developers have extremely anti-business attitudes when you talk to them so it's not a big surprise to see many fail. The ones who are passionate about the business side of things tend to fare a lot better on average.