Where be we

Just a general update today, as I was reminded that it’s been a while since our last post.

So, where are we at.

Well after the rip roaring success (HA) of Viral, we have since released a “lite” version of that game which has been doing ok, around the average we could expect.

We also released Bloove, which in three days eclipsed all our other downloads combined, the current tally of which stands at 879. I’d be happy about this but we released it for free under the “ad supported” pricing model, so our revenue from that is so diminutive that it challenges Alex’s height for smallness.

I’m obviously not serious. Included in Bloove is adverts for Viral and Moojooce, and the fact that 879 people have taken the time to download something that we created is amazing. We are getting as much feedback as we can then we may consider doing a much more in depth sequel, which we’d probably retail for either 59p or £1.20

Back to more current affairs and we are just tying up the loose ends on Moojooce. We’re going to submit it to the app store tomorrow evening, but this time we’re dictating the release date. This is tricky, as apple’s vetting process seems to be performed by the least drunk chimp they can find on the day, and as such it is impossible to accurately predict when the app will reach the store. For example, Viral went through in seven days, whilst Viral Lite, which was released after its mother game and was the exact same game but stopped play after 12 in-game hours, took THIRTEEN DAYS.

So we’re going to gamble, and set Moojooce’s release day for a week on Friday (11/03/11) this way we can set about promoting it with an actual release date, and hopefully garner some hype around the product.

I’m genuinely more proud of Moojooce than anything else we’ve done so far. The art in the game looks extremely characterized, professional and individual, and was obviously created by an extremely handsome man among men. It is addictive to play, whilst being simple enough to be played by all ages.

Hot on the heels of Moojooce will be Moojooce lite, obviously free, and Moojooce arcade, which will be a paid for game, and take the core mechanics of the original game, but differentiate enough to provide a good deal of value for money for the player. Honest.

Next up after that is a secret game, which you can’t know about. So instead I’m going to mention some keywords that might give us a higher viewing from people accidentally stumbling on our awesome blog, and a picture of my cat. Skyrim GDC Sonic Mario Nintendo xbox PS3 Justinbieber.

Noisy Badger Not Noisy Enough

After releasing Viral a few weeks ago now, poor sales have forced a new approach to how we make, release, and promote our games.

The excitement of having created and actually put out there a game of our own was quickly eroded by what we saw as much less than adequate sales. I’m not going to go into specific numbers exactly, but day one sales were only 25% of what were projected. Drop off in sales per day was, ironically enough, exactly as I had projected in our business plan, so at least I was right on that, but without that initial starting volume, Viral as a product was making nowhere near enough money.

So the Noisy Badger hive mind (Alex and I) held crisis talks. It was more than evident that we had done not nearly enough promotion for the project, so that was our starting point. I arranged an online targeted search, keyword relevant marketing campaign, which simply means that if anyone googled relevant search terms that I had chosen, an advert for Viral would show up alongside the search results. From this we achieved a click through rate of around 5%, which is a fantastic result as the best a campaign can usually achieve is 2%. However, it affected our sales in no way whatsoever.

Our second component of the marketing campaign was to give out press releases to as many sites as we could, which then got reposted on other blogs all over the world, which gave us some expansive coverage but only within the core gaming community.

Thirdly, we created a “lite” version of the game. Results from the success of this facet of the campaign are yet to be seen however as after a thirteen day wait, apple still have not processed the app. I’ve emailed to ask what’s going on, but am yet to receive a reply.

Finally, I sent a number of free codes with a nice letter to a number of review sites, however with such a large volume of games being submitted for review the chances of ours getting picked for review are slim.

Not to be disheartened, We began work on two more games immediately, one of which is complete and has been submitted, the second we are in the process of wrapping up currently.

The first game, Bloove, is a simple puzzle game, the core mechanic of which centres around tilting the iOS device to move rectangular blocks around a board in order to slide them into randomly spawning catches.

However, we realised early in development that this title was not strong enough to justify charging even the minimum we could on the app store (59p) and were going to forget the project, when we realised we could still benefit from it by finishing it and releasing it for free, with ad support. My personal thinking on any sort of ad support in games is pretty simple, if I paid for it I don’t want to see ads, but if I get something for free in return for seeing an advertisers’ logo or whatever I’m happy.

Assuming my thinking is similar to most peoples, I was ok with the structure of release, as was Alex. We also put in two of our own adverts at the start of the game as splash screens, which show an advert for Viral, and our upcoming release, MooJooce!

Here’s the ads-

So we await the results of this latest endeavour. Suppose I should talk a little about MooJooce!

MooJooce (it does have an exclamation mark at the end of the title but I’m sick of typing and the word following the exclamation mark autocorrecting! To! Have! A! Capital! Letter! At! The! Beginning) Is a puzzle game in which the player is charged with correctly putting the right colour lids onto bottles of milk as they come off a production line. The challenge lies in the fact that they have to match together three of the same lidded bottles each time to progress, by lining up the bottles correctly in front of three conveyor belts which randomly generate different coloured lids.

AAAAND breathe. Ok it honestly makes sense in game, and its a hell of a lot simpler than I’ve made it sound there, buy it, you’ll see :D. Really should clean up that description before I start sending out press releases.

That’s all for this post people, think the next one I’ll do will be on the dramatic shift between job roles that happens post release, from Games Designer to Marketing Executive.

Cheers,

Olly