Ok, here we are, with the report of February 2012.
This was truly the month of Robo Miner which performed awesome.
I liked the easy to play concept and even my girlfriend ist still playing it multiple times per day just because it is an addicting and funny concept where you can play for hours.
In February I was experiencing many things, that were completely new for me. One of them were the comments in android market for example. Not everyone wil llove your game and you have to accept that.
In February I decided not to try to get decent revenue from my other games, instead I decided to use them to advertise Robo Miner. That was a good idea because there were really some clicks on my House Ads which resulted in new players for Robo Miner.
In every free minute I was busy with enhancing the gameplay of Robo Miner, fixing bugs and implementing new features. Also tried out many stores, signed up in boards, looking up some behaviours.
In this month I learned very much about android, opengl and all of the stuff around it.
I tried many things, some of them were good, some failed, but overall people liked the game and were happy with the changes and the numbers were going upside steadily.
At the end of February I reached:
Impressions: 2.5mio
Fillrate: 100%
CTR: 2.16%
eCPM: 0.64
As you can see, there was an really huge increase of impressions. Robo Miner was downloaded nearly 150.000 times at this point. Most of the Impressions are still delivered by Robo Miner (nearly all of them).
You will also see a huge drop in the eCPM (compared with jan). That drop started right at the beginning of february and over the full month it was never over 0.77. I don't know the exact reason for that.
When I started using ads in my games I was going with the default values for refreshing the ads - maybe that was a bad decision because, this way I was getting many impressions but less clicks.
So I raised the refeshment on Robo Miner to the max (120 sec) and turned off ad refreshment on all my other games.
The eCPM get's more stabilized and I decided to stick with it.
At the end of the Month Robo Miner stabilized also the CTR which was at around 2.5% which is a quite legal value.
My other games are still not very popular and are not often downloaded.
Tablet Tower Defense was downloaded ~2000 times from the beginning on and Minesweeper: Unlimited! stays at around 1000.
I don't know if they will ever rise to an higher level .. also Tablet Tower Defense was pirated very heavily which doesn't help to make mainting very funny :-)
read more:
www.reiti.net/personal-blog/blog/69/how-to-find-pirate-copies-of-your-apps
As long as I do not have any working DRM Mechanism I will not release any adfree/paid versions .. Minesweeper will be the test candidate to try out google licensing, so let's see how that will work.
Because I found, that Minesweeper: Unlimited! really is a good game I decided to put some House Ads in and see how the game will react on it .. As far as I can tell .. at the moment there was no great change in the download numbers.
Currently I am not displaying House Ads in Robo Miner.
Next month I will release another game - a simple one out of the puzzle genre.
Currently I do expect, that this new game will surely not be as sucessful as Robo Miner is .. but I don't want to stop developing and releasing new apps.
I have some more game prototypes ready for further development, but they will need much more effort to get them ready for releasing and currently I spend my low time on Robo Miner to satisfy the players :-)
Hope you enjoyed reading this report!