It seems like if what you’re showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that’s what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they’ve seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they’ve seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
I hate to be discouraging. I wanted to do the same up until these interactions. Depending on what is a livable wage for you, or if you’re doing it on the side, it could still be possible. But I’m in high cost of living areas in the US and it seems totally unfathomable to me. I watched companies spend literal millions of dollars on just advertising to gauge interest in games they then shut down because they couldn’t make the game profitable enough to pay for the ads and their bills etc.
There are definitely success stories, and you can definitely get games released and get players. But I just want to point out that many of the games are simple and just have absolutely astronomical amounts of money behind them. Mobile is fucking crazy and I feel like it’s much harder for smaller devs to get their name out through typical advertising channels.
IMO, which is mostly just guessing based off what I’ve seen, I’d think your time is better spent finding small communities that may be interested in your game and posting about them, as opposed to buying ads etc. Indie dev subreddits and other gaming communities have propped up successful games before, and it may cost you more time and effort, but it just looks extremely hard to compete on the mobile ads playing fields against these huge companies these days.
As somebody who almost got a degree in animation to go work at the big AAA companies, everything you’ve said in this thread about the industry has been right on the money to the view I got that made me bail out in college. There’s plenty more that can be said about working in the industry, but suffice to say they play in their own cesspool, and unless you’ve got serious financial backing, it’s not worth trying to compete.
Even speaking of just the indie scene, don’t go in expecting to make anything on a game. Many of the indie studios you see on Steam will never go on to make a second game because their first never became profitable and the company went bankrupt. Even plenty of the more popular indie games will never make back what they cost. There’s those one in a million games like Lethal Company, but you should do it because you like making games, not because you expect to quit your day job.
Yeah. All of this rings really true. I find it really sad because not long ago it felt like a lot of games cropped up from small indie groups. Hell, many of the big names now like blizzard were formed by small groups of friends. But it feels like in the 2010s, big entertainment money got involved and now it’s a festering cesspool.
I’ve been mostly making games for fun and am fairly risk adverse so am planning on sticking with a stable job and making games in my free time.
It’s discouraging, but it is reality. I still want to try, but definitely not putting more than one egg in this basket.
I’ll admit I’m knowingly doing the following haha
hopefully it’ll at least be a positive experience and I learn something from it
You’re only about a month in, aim to release on somewhere like itch.io instead of a mobile store. Join some dev communities and game jams and the like. Building up a following like that is a million times easier than trying to get noticed in the sea of SEO games in an app store.
I’ve been doing itch and jams for a little bit, even managed to win one once. I’ve learned a lot but can’t shake this feeling that I’m just making free games for itch. You might be right though… whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.
You might be right though… whatever kind of sea of games I think itch is, the mobile sea may be a lot worse.
It definitely is. I think it’s really hard to comprehend how much garbage is floating around mobile app stores. In recent times, it’s gotten to the point where if you release a new game, even people searching for your exact game name might not find it just because of how much stuff they have to sort through and how much they have to “suppress”. It’s hard to tell how much stuff you’re really up against in those stores because it’s so hard to even see a portion of it. There’s just so much and everything relies on algorithms and recommendations.
Mobile games are also mostly played by hyper casuals, and the space is dominated by dopamine hit money extractors, so people that don’t want that basically left, and everyone that remains is expecting it. If you don’t think you fit into that model, I would also recommend itch or steam because the user bases there will likely match your target audience better, and there’s less stuff to compete with there.
