Success or failure?

I released my game Drone Invaders about a week ago. It's a free to play shooter game for Android with optional in-app purchases. I did successful promotion on LudumDare, Java-gaming and HN websites, which got me to about 1000 installs so far. I'll soon post more stats about user retention, games played, etc.

I also posted in Shoot 'em up forums, TIG forums, IndieGameMag and added info to IndieDB. All those did not bring in much interest. Judging from player feedback, the main source of interest was HN post, where some people were more excited that I created the game in just 23 days, than in the game itself.

All this got me $0.69 profit so far (if you ignore the $25 fee to open a developer account on Google Play) as one person bought one in-game pack of coins. LudumDare challenge is to earn $1, so I need only one more purchase. But, it seems that will be a huge challenge to get it.

I also tried promoting the game on Twitter, but from my 200 followers I had prior to launching, only 3 tried the game. I guess you really have to engage daily with a lot of people to even get them to read your tweets. After the launch I got about 180 new followers. BTW, using bit.ly to track how many clicks came from which source (Twitter, forums, etc.) is a great idea, I'm sorry I did not apply it everywhere.

I posted several posts on Reddit and I noticed someone from HN crowd also posted. While mine posts to /r/gaming, /r/gamedev were barely voted up, that other one in /r/Android got some +187 votes and got some attention.

I wrote an e-mail to eleven journalists who do cover mobile games and I thought would be interested about the game. No reviews came out of that. In fact, nobody replied except for one guy who was decent enough to tell me that he thinks that the game is not worth covering on his main website, but I could try the forums. I guess it's hard to get through with retro graphics.

To be honest, I'm a little bit tired of banging my head against the wall with the marketing. The user reviews on Google Play are great, but the game is not very attractive when you look at screenshots or video, it only shines when you play it yourself. I have no idea how to get some journalist that covers Android to try the game?

read more... Tweet to @bigosaur Bigosaur, 2013-10-31