And to mention that Rise Up is a clone rip off of a game made here with BB. And was cloned by Voodoo as well. Force Escape BB game by @brouleau. Shoot i even cloned it but i credited him.
Ignore @VectologyGames, he thinks he's sooooo cool because he makes cool games and is actually cool. What a loser/cool guy.
That was actually one of the best threads lately, with a very realistic view on things. Let's face it, its a tough business and the challenge keep rising. A lot of bigger players are turning their eyes on casual and hyper casual which means that the competition will get stiffer. I would disagree a bit on the quality side of things, especially if you want to make a sustainable business of things. One approach would be to make sure that you provide the best possible experience to players and build your own community around that. It's nice to be able to knock off a quick game with a few basic shapes but is it the best way to stand out in a crowed market? One good example of that is a studio like Bloop Games. They have their uniqueness in hyper casual and deliver on quality and managed to get an audience that keeps coming at them.
hey @AppTout not sure why I am seeing this thread just today - I have been login in the forum for the past whole week and never saw it. Anyway, first of all - GREAT post. I enjoyed reading it, and I agree with almost everything you said. But it was this final comment that made me reply to you: I would add to that comment: and we should be sharing the knowledge we have between each other IF AND ONLY IF we are all sharing equally valuable knowledge between us. I have been for example testing for the past few months paid UA through instagram ads. They do work (they work very well actually) but you have to have the money to spend. And in my case I have had to put hundreds if not thousands of dollars into doing A/B testing of ads in the platform to see which ones work and which don't. I have even managed to get one ad at a CPI as low as 10 cents per install (according to @Christoph that is the holly grail of paid UA on Facebook). BTW I just mentioned Christoph because he is the one that contacted me and some others asking to share information like this between us and I believe it is a genius idea. If we are all spending money into ad researching then the easiest way to scale that is by sharing the knowledge between us (provided that we are all spending money on that research), in that way we can learn from each other mistakes and in the long run will be cheaper and more effective for us. But of course this information is not free - so I am not OK with sharing it for free. If you want to learn from my mistakes you have to spend some money too making your own mistakes so I can learn from then as well - does that makes sense? it is a give - take type of relationship. I sometimes notice some sort of competition between developers (I have been unconsciously doing it myself as well), but when you think about it the market is so big that we don't really represent that much of a treat to each other. So I am all in favour of sharing knowledge between us to make us more competitive in the stores. I am going to send you a PM with a link to a private telegram group. I hope to see you there.. Thanks for such a good post I really enjoyed reading it. Have a nice weekend Jonathan
Agreed with everything you posted and joined the group. Plenty of knowledge that wasn’t posted here since I understand the “give to get” world
Here is some advice I hope you all consider. Game dev for 20+ years here. I like to think I have seen it all up until this point. What Voodoo and Ketchapp and all the rest are doing is nothing new. Ever hear of Kongregate, Miniclip, New Grounds, or Big Fish? They've been around for decades. They were just like these new companies on the App Store. They load up their portfolios with low quality, casual games and make money from the shear quantity of what they have. That's it. It's nothing special. Just because it has a shiny new name like Hyper Casual doesn't mean it hasn't been done before. These newer App Store companies just have to use different strategies because they have to share the space with everyone else. In the olden time, long ago, like 10-15 years ago, these old guys just had their own entire websites full of flash games so competition wasn't really a concern. All that really happened was that the market for this stuff shifted from websites to mobile because everyone has a smart phone now. The flash site guys were never a huge deal to the game development circle. Sure they had their fanbase and success, but we mostly didn't pay attention to them. Same with these new App Store companies. Sure, 2 million downloads sounds impressive, but it's just crappy ad revenue in return, and they literally have to market to billions of people to get those numbers, so meh, it's really not that impressive at all. Of course 2 million out of a billion are going to try something that's free, I would actually expect more. Your problem is that you're competing with companies that have a ton of games and are willing to spend a lot to push those games. If you really want to make a lot of money making mobile games then look at the popular indie titles. That's the only way you're going to be able to do it. They're not hyper casual games at all. They're high quality games that are difficult and time consuming to make. Some you could call casual, but they're extremely well thought out and made. There is no easy route to rake in millions with hyper casual unless you're one of the extremely lucky ones. You see this happening to people because literally millions of people are trying to do it at the same time and some are just super lucky and somehow go viral on social media or something. You might as well just play the lottery, it's a lot easier and the odds are better. If your marketing campaigns don't pan out in the long run and you don't get traction from just word of mouth it is because you just have bad games in your portfolio. You also don't have the resources to push the junk like Voodoo does. So I'm not sure what you're expecting to find or figure out. You either join forces with one of the hyper casual companies(which is exactly what Buildbox does with their own games, so it should be even more obvious that it's the only real way) or go at it with a lot of hard work at determination and make something worth talking about. Otherwise you're just wasting your time. I'm not trying to be mean and call you bad game developers or anything like that. I'm just calling it as I see it. Buildbox 3 will give you a lot more ability if you want to make a casual game(or any kind of game really), but you have to work hard and make something special if you want to succeed, or you can just keep at it as you are and try to get lucky. That's just the way it is.