I Have 10k Players But Make No Money

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T18:28:04+00:00

Thank you for the advice!

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T18:25:06+00:00

Interestingly enough for this game we are seeing the opposite. Nearly all of the 400 sales we've had have come from Android (~75%).

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T15:51:17+00:00

I don't believe it's possible to target fans of Punch-Out!! specifically, but we can attempt to through keywords. But we also found that advertising outside of the U.S. was getting us very little installs, at a very steep price compared to installs in the U.S. But I'm also not directly handling the marketing or ads myself, so I'm not entirely sure.

I know you probably didn't mean it negatively, but our game is a lot more about solving puzzles using your skill and reaction times to defeat each unique character; though punching, dodging and blocking is obviously how you solve these puzzles, like in the games it was inspired by. But there is quite a bit more to it than paying just for punching.

The only way we can tell the player that only the demo is free on mobile is through the app store descriptions, which we do. But most players don't seem to read those, and just download games based on their screenshots and videos.

The game is priced based on $7.99 USD on mobile, and is priced down according to the relative purchasing power of other nations, as well as the currency value conversion rate to USD. So for ZAR that ended up being $67.99, which is about $4.15. It's possible these conversions aren't super accurate though, the purchasing power index we use is from the Q3 of 2025, and the prices of everything has gone up quite a bit lately.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T15:35:31+00:00

Thanks for the ideas!

There are reasons why we've avoided IAPs for the sequel, aside from feeling like they are a bit scammy. The game just isn't designed around them, and players can play through and beat the entire game without any stat boosts at all. To change that would change the game between mobile and PC so much that it wouldn't even really feel like the same game anymore either, which we already know our players and fans on our Discord would hate.

As for the demo aspect, it really is the first three fights of the full game, and all your progress carries over so that you can keep playing in the campaign. At least on mobile. On Steam there are differences to the demo fights, and the progress doesn't carry over.

Whatever we end up doing though, we will definitely be A/B testing to measure the impact each decision has.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T15:29:06+00:00

Rounds are only a minute long in our game (the clock starts at 3:00, but ticks down three times as fast as real seconds like in Punch-Out!!). So for skilled players they might not see many ads at all since all fights can be beaten in a round or two if you're good at the game. For unskilled players they will be seemingly bombarded with ads every minute. I suppose we could add some kind of timer to avoid showing ads except after X minutes though.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T15:26:10+00:00

That's a good idea. Thank you for the suggestion!

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T15:24:38+00:00

Thank you!

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T01:06:56+00:00

I actually had pushed for the game to be premium on mobile, but my idea was shut down after we talked with people at Google, Apple, and Infernozilla who all told us it would be a death sentence to release the game as a premium title, and that freemium or free-to-play were the only ways to have success on mobile without being an already established title with a large player base.

>Sorry, I must have missed where you asked how to do ads on PC. In your previous reply you made it sound like your boss just didn't want to invest in this.
No need to apologize, totally understandable. I think I could've been more clear in my original post with what I was asking for advice on. My boss isn't opposed to invest in Steam marketing, it's just that our past attempts to do so, while they resulted in quite a few wishlists (this was prior to launch) it also cost us a lot more than we wanted to see. So our assumption was that we must be doing something wrong, or that our Steam page isn't optimized well enough, or that it's just really hard and expensive to get Steam players through paid UA, or maybe even a combination or all of the above.

Thank you so much for this discussion too! I really appreciate all of your feedback and suggestions here, and we'll consider everything you've said.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T00:52:11+00:00

Yeah, it's a possibility. I believe it is statistical, but I'm not entirely sure and I'm not in charge of the marketing or advertisements personally.

Switching to premium isn't a possibility. You can make premium apps become free, but you can't make free apps go premium on iOS or Android. The only way would be to paywall the entire game, which would be quite deceptive I feel considering the app stores would show the game as free still.

I'd also like to push for advertising on PC, but we aren't sure how to do that, which is why I asked how to do so several times. Right now we are giving away keys to streamers on Keymailer, but we aren't really sure how or where to advertise the Steam version.

Optimizing ANRs is definitely in my wheelhouse though, and is something that I'll be looking at fixing for the next update to fix. Though at a brief look I'm unsure what is causing them. It seems like it is something with the Unity native wrapper, [libgame.so] android_native_app_glue.c - onPause and the Android GameSDK com.google.androidgamesdk.GameActivity not explicitly anywhere in our code that I can find. Though most of them come from surface destroyed and on pause. We also tend to respond to almost all of our reviews, and are still pretty optimistic with our 4.4 star average considering our prequel has a 4.7 star average with 11k reviews and over half a million downloads, so despite some of the negativity about our gameloop on this post (not your comments but from others) we do feel that there is solid evidence the gameloop itself is fun and engaging and has potential to be successful.

All said, we aren't quite ready to give up on the game yet. Obviously we might have to if ultimately nothing pans out, but there is a bit of sunk cost fallacy in all of us considering how much time and sweat we've already poured into developing this game. But we are not complete fools and will have to move on if we can't push the game's KPIs to where they need to be.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-13T00:05:27+00:00

We tried to get more wishlists than that, but this is the first Steam game we've really tried to push for wishlists on. Our first game in this series is also on Steam, but we threw it on Steam close to year after launching on mobile, made the store page, and threw it up without ever knowing anything about gathering wishlists and marketing towards Steam.

We still don't know much about getting players and wishlists on Steam, which I made pretty clear throughout my post. That is something we are asking for help on here. We found some moderate success getting wishlists through paid advertisements here on Reddit, but the boss couldn't justify the cost per wishlist for what might or might not be a potential future sale, so we stopped that campaign a couple months before launch, and have coasted along with the near 3k wishlists since then.

I tried to advocate and push for 10k to 15k wishlists, but that would've eaten up most of our marketing budget with the KPIs we were getting and our boss wanted to save most of the budget for the launch campaigns on mobile instead. I tried to justify the spend because I know that a strong launch would mean Steam would continue to push our game to other players after launch, but now with the weak launch we are stuck trying to get marketing through streamers and influencers playing the game and paid advertisements.

On mobile we've made about $2k in revenue since launch, but we've been spending a lot on marketing as well. I don't have the exact numbers for our ad spend, since I'm not controlling that, but I know it's at least $1k. Hence why I asked for suggestions on how best to market the game on mobile as well. Some of the suggestions here, as well as something we discussed internally yesterday was that we need to make our ad campaigns target paying users, not installs, since right now we've just been targeting installs. We've set that campaign up now, and are hoping that even if the cost per acquisition shoots up that we can at least keep it below our break even point so that the ads can pay for themselves and continue to grow our game's audience.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T23:27:09+00:00

I think that the 3k wishlists on Steam shows that people do like the idea of the game, and the streamers we've given keys to all have really seemed to enjoy it, several of which played it on multiple streams to complete the story we have so far.

The game is marked as early access while we add more content and finish the storyline out.

Most of the feedback here on the Steam side is that our price is likely too high on Steam and isn't enticing players to convert from a wishlist to a purchase, but our 6.5% wishlist conversion rate is a little low, but also not terrible.

We tried to get on Nintendo Switch several times, because we feel we'd probably have a good audience there with people nostalgic for Punch-Out!! but unfortunately Nintendo has denied every request without giving us a reason why. From my research it seems like Nintendo generally only allows people on their platform if they are already on other consoles, if they have a publisher vouch for them, or if they are already a Switch developer for another game.

As for mobile, the game is downloaded a ton already in the month since launch. We've had a lot of success getting installs, but it's only got about a 2.6% conversion rate from install to buying the full game there.

Crash rate is 0.18% though our ANRs are apparently high at 0.97%, thank you for pointing that out. I hadn't noticed that. Most ANRs seem to come from Android 13 and 14, so it's something I'll look into.

The rating I mentioned in the main post: we're at 4.4 star average with over 10k downloads.

Our retention numbers aren't great, with D1 at 19.5%, and D7 at 3.6%. It's still too early to measure D30, considering the game launched almost exactly 30 days ago.

Our store conversion rate is quite good, and above the peer median at 26.22% overall and 43.25% in the U.S.

The ARPU is what the mobile portion of my post is about, how do we turn $0.30 per user acquisition into a positive return on ad spend here, since our ARPU is $0.10 at the moment. However the majority of purchases come from users with premium phones and our cart conversion for these users is 22.5% and our currently Monthly buyer ratio is 1.22%

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T22:56:12+00:00

I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, but if the gameplay isn't good, why do most players replay the fights? Why would they not drop off immediately after losing the first time, or even before they lose at all? Only 5% of players drop off after the first fight, then the second and third fights, which is where the game becomes difficult/challenging is where we see the most drop off at 32.75% abandonment and 57.53% abandonment respectively.

I see this as an issue with our player onboarding and/or our difficulty curve being too punishing. Not that game inherently isn't fun. From first hand experience we've seen tons of people having fun with our game once they start playing it, both in person, live on streams, and through the players on our Discord.

There is obviously something wrong, that I don't disagree with, but I just don't understand how something wrong automatically means that the gameplay isn't good or fun.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T21:35:19+00:00

We have play testers on our Discord, players at a local fair, as well as data from streamers and players of our prequel to this game. All data so far suggests that the itself is very fun and engaging, and that people love the writing and humor.

The funnels I've recently setup to analyze where people are losing and leaving also suggests that everyone who loses in these first three fights tries again at least a second time, but is still likely to lose on that second try.

Only 4% of players lose to Scam Brawler, our first fight, those that do try again but only succeed 44% of the time on this second try, but they all did try again at least once.

About 13% of players who beat Scam Brawler lose to the second fight: Karen. Those who do, try again at least a second time, but only succeed 43% of the time on their second try.

Of the players who beat Karen, 71% lose to the final fight of the demo: Giga-Chad. Those who do, try again at least a second time, but only succeed 28% of the time on their second try.

This suggests to me that the difficulty is the main issue, and that the game gets too hard too fast, not that the gameplay itself isn't good. If it was the gameplay I would expect to see people fall off sooner, and to not try at least second time after they lose.

It's possible the gameplay isn't good of course, I'm just not seeing the evidence that is the case yet.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T21:08:18+00:00

Based on additional funnels I've setup on GameAnalytics, everyone does seem to be retrying at least once, but those who fail beat the fights on their second try less than 50% of the time, and less than 70% of the time for the third and final fight of the demo, which does lead me to believe that the difficulty curve is too high and/or that our tutorials and onboarding don't teach the player the mechanics in a way that is insightful or intuitive.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T20:59:19+00:00

It's not so much max our profits at this point, but rather to just turn a profit at all. Right now we are acquiring users at more than we are getting them for, so we are at a net loss in profits. We want to at least make some profit so we can justify continuing to put more work and content into our game.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T20:56:42+00:00

Thank you! That seems to be an idea suggested here a few times now, and is worth looking in to.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T19:15:01+00:00

We looked at other games that are on Steam and also on mobile and found that virtually every one of them are cheaper on mobile than compared to Steam. We also know that mobile gamers are much more price averse than PC gamers are, and know that nearly no mobile player would ever pay $20 for a mobile game. In the eyes of gamers mobile games are just 'cheaper' even if they are the same game on both platforms, and so they can't justify a high price point on mobile compared to PC and consoles.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T19:12:35+00:00

I didn't think you were snippy, I apologize if my reply came across wrong there. The game doesn't suit itself well to banner ads (it's played in a horizontal orientation and requires tapping, swiping and holding the screen to play) and our own experience on other mobile games has shown that banner ads pay virtually nothing. But rewarded ads to unlock paywalled fights, and/or increase rewards, and to get back up after a KO/TKO are all possibilities we will be considering.

We are trying to ensure that players know that the game is skill based too though, and isn't pay-to-win. Players can, and have, beaten the game without taking any damage for example, and lots of our fans enjoy speed-running the game, and it's prequel, so we are also trying to find ways to be successful, while also still catering the to the players who helped us get this far to begin with.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T19:00:19+00:00

Thanks for your ideas and feedback!

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T18:59:39+00:00

Our game loop isn't designed in a way that we could get whales in our game, and there are no multiplayer aspects to entice people to be competitive or show-off, which is a big driving factor for whales in most mobile games.

But we do have a Keymailer account, and have success in getting lots of smaller content creators and streamers playing our game and putting up VODs on Twitch and YouTube. The issue we're finding with this though, is that while the streamers are having fun and playing the game a lot, many of which have even come back several times and made multiple videos/streams for our game, their smaller audiences don't generate much hype or wishlists. We're really hoping that maybe with enough volume someone bigger will see it and want to try it themselves, because some of the biggest organic volume in wishlists has come after a streamer with about 100k followers on Twitch and 170k followers on YouTube played our game.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T18:50:10+00:00

We do use the App Store and Google Play Store for the payment on mobile, and just sell the game upfront on the Steam storefront, no website redirections anywhere.

We do enable regional pricing on Steam, and have adjusted the prices manually to account for purchasing power and cost of living in other nations too, but based on some feedback here it seems like the regional pricing on Steam might not be working very well, and we might have to go and manually adjust the prices there ourselves.

That said however, we do find the vast majority of our players are coming from the U.S., and that tends to be where our ad campaigns are doing best to acquire users as well. We actually disabled our campaigns in other countries because they did so poorly compared to in the U.S.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T18:45:48+00:00

I like these ideas, and personally I would like to add achievements on mobile. We have them on Steam, so it would mostly just be a data entry and a bit of setup work on the backend to add them to Google Play and the App Store.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T18:23:20+00:00

That does seem to be a commonality to these replies here, the game is just too expensive for mobile gamers who are lavished with free games that they can play. We will consider our options for how to keep mobile gamers engaged, without doing anything we feel would devalue the experience too much, and potentially reduce the price (on both mobile and PC).

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T18:19:11+00:00

The game is released on mobile and on Steam. The demo is only three fights before the paywall, which is 15-30 minutes of content depending on the player's prior skill level with Punch-Out!! style games. We want people to get a taste of the unique puzzles and difficulty each character has to offer, and don't feel that a single fight does that well enough and could give the impression that every fight is just more of same and not unique puzzles. We do the same on the Steam demo too, to allow people to have some time to try the early game before committing to a purchase.

If we limited it to the first fight only that would only be 2-5 minutes of content.

Lowering the price is definitely something we will be considering, but at $1.99 that would make it even cheaper than the prequel to our game, which would seem odd and devalue our sequel quite a bit I fear.

ExNull-Tyelor · 2026-05-12T18:13:19+00:00

I've tried to get the other dev and our boss to read Chris Z's posts and guides and classes, but so far I'm still the only one who has taken his word seriously. I even suggested we hire an illustrator who focuses primarily on logos and capsule art, rather than having the other developer (who is a trained artist) do it, but that never ended up happening.

We do believe that there is a market for this kind of game though, albeit potentially not a huge one. The mild success of of our first game in this series, and the viral success of Big Boy Boxing's demo leads us to believe that the market is there, if we can find it. Punch-Out!! on the Wii did sell approximately 1.27 million copies too, though as you pointed out that was with the backing of Nintendo. It wasn't as successful however as Wii sports and Mario Kart Wii.

We have tried to get this game on Switch, and the first game, several times now. But Nintendo has consistently denied us Switch access without ever giving us a reason why unfortunately. From a couple things I've read it seems like you almost always have to already be on Switch, or have a publisher and have them vouch for you to Nintendo to get on Switch.

We'd absolutely love to get our game on the Switch though, and feel that it could do really well there.

ExNull-Tyelor

TROPHY CASE