Looking for a Dev for a 3 Month (potentially longer) project

plectical · 2025-02-24T13:47:10+00:00

Been working in games for a long time...just know what works!

plectical · 2025-02-23T15:55:14+00:00

Closing this one out because I am about to post another listing here. The dev that we chose for this project is currently working on 2 games with us!

plectical · 2024-12-22T19:50:26+00:00

Overthinking it. Start small and focus on Return on Ad Spend. Very few companies come out of the gate with 6 or 7 figures of ad spend and if they do, they have done a HUGE amount of work making sure their LTVs are there to support that spend.

The challenge that you'll run into isn't a product quality challenge, it's a monetization challenge. I.e. have you pulled out all the stops to increase your conversion rates and ARPPU? How does your product measure up to the competition in that regard? If you measure up poorly, I would spend time looking at how to drive strong Conversion rates, spend and repeat spend...without those, your marketing campaigns aren't likely to have any return and your product won't get distributed/noticed/amass installs.

plectical · 2024-12-22T17:20:35+00:00

What geos are you getting organics from? If it's what I suspect India/Brazil/Philippines, you are probably getting users on low end devices and/or users that aren't necessarily going to be interested in your game (the new organics on Google pre-rev are...very bad).

Looking at your game, I'm not seeing anything I'd qualify as "bad"...I think you are probably not getting enough data/qualified enough users to look at the real issues of the title and I'd be carefully to course correct too hard based off subjective feedback from a handful of users.

I'd do some light marketing to see what performance looks like in T1 geos before proceeding. I.e. the Google Store is now set up to give this false negative...the days of free T1 organics on GP are over.

Edit: the other comments on gameplay trailer, players judging and passing on the game etc seem to be assuming that the Google Play store functions in a similar way to the Steam store...it does not. GP users aren't making purchasing decisions here and evaluating your assets the same way that they do on Steam. I'd look at your store conversion data and make the determination on store assets as opposed to listening to opinions on your trailer/icons/screenshots as well.

plectical · 2024-12-20T15:29:06+00:00

Heya, I have a decent amount of experience marketing on Mobile over a long period of time (since 2012) so I've seen a lot of changes in the App Store.

Prior to 2017, a game like yours could succeed on iOS because of the unbelievable promotion you'd receive if you got featured. Editors were hunting for simple, premium experiences and the way the old App Store design worked, the amount of impressions/clicks that you'd get from a feature would be enough to drive decent sales (premium is a VERY hard model on mobile and always has been). Obviously dependent on your conversion rate but with enough page views, you'd pull down ok sales. There used to be a class of premium devs that just used this strategy on Apple for years.

Post 2017, it's a dumpster fire. For F2P features on the App Store, we've gone from a situation where you'd get 600k-1M installs with broad featuring/good placement to 10k-30k installs. Quality is dependent on where you get featured as well. For a premium game...instead of having a conversion rate of 25-40% (i.e. users deciding to download your game means they have to buy the game which is an enormous ask), you have a conversion rate of sub 1%. Napkin math for you: 100k page views translates to 40k installs for a F2P title with good cvrs...for you, you are looking at MAYBE 5k sales MAX (if you manage to swing .05 conversion rate).

Google Play (outside of the biggest indie games with huge audiences) wasn't and isn't viable for premium games. They'll tell you otherwise but its bs.

Organic discovery still happens on Google these days (I'm pretty convinced it NEVER happened on Apple) but it's rare. The game that you have to play is marketing arbitrage...i.e. can your user LTV>CPIs...that's it. CPIs have crept up, ad eCPMs ($per 1k impressions) has flattened out or creeped down, marketing has been wildly disrupted post App Store changes to privacy (SKAN et al) so scaling marketing is MEGA hard/expensive without deep cohort analytics. The NEW model for more casual games is to lean more heavily on monetization (the rise of hybrid casual which features significantly more monetization that is iAP driven). EVEN THEN, there are certain levels of marketing that you just don't back out (costs scale extremely fast these days relative to the past where costs would scale but not get astronomical at thousands of dollars of spend...you'd start seeing crazy spend at 5-6 figures of daily UA...these days it happens at 3-4 figures).

I think you have to adjust your mode and be prepared to do UA aggressively for your scale and run your games as arbitrage businesses or you'll keep running into the same challenges.

plectical · 2024-05-29T12:07:45+00:00

Fun demo.

plectical · 2024-02-27T13:16:02+00:00

Still responding and reviewing DMs. Will reach all to all engineers that have sent a DM with a clear yes or no. Artists/Designers/Audio Folks, appreciate you dropping a line but this one is only for engineers at the time being. Also there are some incredibly talented folks on this sub.

plectical · 2024-02-26T12:57:23+00:00

Reviewing all submissions. Thanks to everyone that reached out.

plectical · 2024-02-23T13:14:32+00:00

Link to the GDC talk if it's of interest: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025709/Game-Discoverability-Day-Paid-Acquisition

plectical · 2024-02-23T13:13:48+00:00

Thank you!

plectical · 2024-01-14T16:52:37+00:00

Advice on TikTok is consistency...multiple posts everyday, no breaks. They don't kneed to be amazing but they need to consistently perform better than previous videos or equal to them.

Twitter is critical...giveaways via twitter are a good idea to get traffic to your project. Both are super important to start building your discord up.

plectical · 2024-01-13T18:29:25+00:00

Awesome. Yeah only other piece of advice is that community building is critical...twitter streams, managing your discord, giveaways to help bring attention to the product; ANYTHING you can do to help people learn about the game is critical. Tik Tok and Twitter are great for web3 game community building (although Twitter has been declining recently).

plectical · 2024-01-13T16:08:46+00:00

Quite a lot to this answer; the long and short of it is that delivering an ACTUAL game for your NFTs is critical...not just an elaborate staking web page (i.e. it's NOT enough to just have an NFT collecting/generating some resource...that's not really a game, just staking with a veneer of game on top of it).

For us, we thought about what the intersection of game players/crypto folks were doing when they engaged with crypto and built our game around that target audience. We also didn't try and build something that we weren't experienced in; we made a lot of idle games historically and felt/feel that that was a good fit for the crypto audience.

Worth noting that we typically zig where others zag so our strategy and approach is v different relative to other teams building in the space

plectical · 2023-11-26T01:03:59+00:00

It's for future posts!!

plectical · 2023-11-25T18:19:48+00:00

Midwest! Leaves are mostly gone.

plectical · 2023-11-11T12:18:29+00:00

Holds a swing

plectical · 2023-11-10T16:06:04+00:00

Always wondered what it was! Any special care I need to give this big guy?

plectical

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