So after several months of coding and designing in my spare time, I've finally finished my first mobile game for Android and put it up on the android market. I'm really proud of my work and I learned a lot from doing it, so at this point I don't have any regrets regardless of what happens next.

However after the first week has come and gone, I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed. All my friends and family has finished trying it out, all my promotional posts have slipped from the front page of their respective forums into obscurity, and now all I'm left with is silence and the faint sound of crickets. Haven't had any downloads in two days, and I've been watching a big "0 active users" for the last several hours on my analytics page.

I always knew this day would come, though I didn't expect it to be quite this desolate. I knew I wasn't going to have a million players, though I thought that somehow I'd end up with at least a slow trickle of downloads wandering in from the corners of the android market. I guess I was wrong, as I'm now discovering.

Just curious for anyone else out there who has been in my position, what happened after you released your small indie game? Was there any promotion that you did that you found to be effective in any way (big word of mouth network, advertising, promotion in any particular store/forum/network)? How did you find your first few hundred players, if you ever got that many?

Or did you just abandon your game, write it off as a learning experience and move on to other pursuits?

Would love to hear some experiences of other developers who have been there, even if the conclusions are not particularly inspiring
Thanks for reading!

My limited experience tells me that you've got to make it from the new app section to the top app section right away or your game will wither away and die. The concept of release early and release often really can't apply to mobile games, especially those without a massive budget for marketing.

My limited experience tells me that you've got to make it from the new app section to the top app section right away or your game will wither away and die. The concept of release early and release often really can't apply to mobile games, especially those without a massive budget for marketing.

indeed, a bad early rating will kill your app, so if you get off to bad start rating wise you should consider releasing your improvements as a sequel rather than as an update.