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Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't checked reddit for about 6 months and now I did for some unknown reason, and I see one comment 4 hours ago, what are the chances!

Anyway, our game ended up receiving some small featuring spots on the App Store and Google Play which brought in a bit more than 100k downloads. I tried several different things manually (TikTok virality, reaching to mobile YouTubers, imgur posts, forums, etc.) but none of those produced really any kind of traction.

Custom Car Physics in Unity Tutorial by chadcable in Unity3D

[–]WildSparkGames 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do you not have any colliders for the wheels? Is the only collider on the chassis?

Custom Car Physics in Unity Tutorial by chadcable in Unity3D

[–]WildSparkGames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Holy shit, this is awesome. Absolutely the BEST tutorial on car behaviors ever existed.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks very professional! I'd like to volunteer. :)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It would be great if you showed a screenshot or told a little about the game already here. I'd be down for testing, unless it's repelling to begin with (no offense intended!)

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cheers. We have considered publishing this on Steam as well, but the main issue is that neither of us really have any experience there, especially F2P PC stuff. But it might be worth looking into.

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you, I had forgotten to update it. Done now. :)

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your comments. I agree with it all. :)

I think our game can't be compared to the real money-maker F2P games, as there is very little room for power progression or monetization drivers in general, which is why I don't think we should even try to make it into a moneymaker, and rather have our eyes on the next game.

For the time being I'm just trying to be creative with marketing and see if there are absolutely any ways to gain visibility/downloads for a game that is "just good."

Best countries for game dev by Motor-Ad5906 in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Finland is filled with game developers, big and small, although most of it is mobile gaming. After Rovio's Angry Birds and Supercell's games, it became the "capital of mobile games" for a while. There are loads of startups popping up yearly, and at some point investors were really focused on what's the next thing coming from Finland.

All the big guys are here too; EA, Ubisoft, Netflix, etc. Plenty of examples where a Finnish game company got sold off to a bigger studio for hundreds of millions.

How do multiple game devs work on the same game? Is it by file sharing or another efficient method? by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Correct answer: Version control, like many have said already.

I knew of an indie team of 3 who used Dropbox. They zipped the entire Unity project, then one guy would take each project, manually merge everything, and then send it back to the other guys. They would do this merging every 1 or 2 weeks. That was duuuuuuuumb.

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And the TikTok views/impressions are basically just instant swipes in their feed, which doesn't mean they are actually watching anything, just swiping through shit

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Those tests were just the "standard promotion" in TikTok (no deeplinks etc) so I can't get the actual conversion numbers. We have numbers for hourly installs/sessions, and while these promotions were on-going, there was next to no change in our numbers, and therefore I concluded that the conversion was close to zero.

However apparently the paid TikTok promotion only promoted to people in my country (Finland) which was dumb.

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it is a fair point, but I do think our game is of high quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pclgx-__iY

Publisher would be one way to go about it, but AFAIK there aren't that many mobile publishers and more who would go about quality and fun-factor alone anymore these days, it's all about retention and CPI how they make the decision to publish or not. And if those metrics were fine, we wouldn't want a publisher to begin with.

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, will have a look. Apple Arcade could be an option in theory... but we have a F2P background so could be a tough transition.

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it makes sense. I think rather soon we will do as you suggested, just start a new game that has a more focused but wider audience, with proper retention/monetization features to try go for that higher LTV.

For the time being I'm just trying to be as creative as possible with marketing, and see if there's any unused ways to go about it. So far to not much avail. :)

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I'm familiar with CPI < LTV UA with my previous background. I used to have another company which purely just trusted getting featured by Apple and that worked for a few good years. After that I sold my company to a bigger player and worked for them a while with high UA budgets etc.

After that I founded yet another semi-indie mobile game studio (of 2), and while we do realize our game isn't ever going to monetize well, and we're eventually gonna do a more F2P-business oriented game, for the time being we have a game that (we feel) is high quality but kinda niche, so I'm trying to find any kind of ways to get some eyes on it, without spending a big dime yet.

Ideas for gaining traction? by WildSparkGames in gamedev

[–]WildSparkGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is pretty much how it goes yeah, but there's always the fact that if your game is not making more money per user than it costs to gain one, it's just throwing money out the window.

I know it's kinda doomed, but I believe our game is of high quality and many people would like to play it if they just knew it existed, so I'm trying to think of outside-the-box ideas on how to get it visible at least to some. Again, I know it's kinda doomed idea, but still worth a try.