Hi guys, I getting a little bit concerned here. I released my game on the 14 of July hoping downloads would just sparkle; like all of you I worked really hard trying to meet the development/release deadline (12 months in my case) and felt happy with the results.

But, tomorrow 10 days will have passed and my game has a deplorable 1+ downloads showing in the Google Play Store profile page. The downloads are nonexistent . What's more depressing is that (maybe subjective here) worse games are rocking with 1000 downloads(of which 400 are 5 star ratings, lol, you know the story ) ...

How should i track this ? Is there any hope of improvement ,can it get better from here, or can it only stay worse as it is ? It's as if I don't appear in Google Play searches (I only have 50 video views in Youtube analythics for my Trailer video from the google play profile page) . I'm from Eastern Europe would that make a difference to Google ?

I won't post a link to my game so to not make this post seem like a plug but if you're interested you can search it in Google Play, it's called Space Blockers .

This is a really disappointing experience for me , hope you guys give me some feedback as to what I'm doing wrong (besides the video trailer , I'm working on that, ... even though I've seen much worse with tens of thousands of downloads).

Thank you!

Well, did you do any sort of advertising for it before release? If nobody knows it exists, it's hard to get someone to download it, unless you get extremely lucky and it somehow gets found and people share it, which is unlikely.

Moving you to our Business forum since you're looking for marketing advice rather than announcing something. :)

One thing which stands out for me - the lack of marketing.

For a mobile game to be successful, it needs either luck or a huge marketing budget (or time if you can do it well, if not you get what you pay for). Checked your Moddb page, it has less activity than my unsuccessful mod for Morrowind and no watchers at all. I see no press releases from first glance and Google Instant doesn't even suggest your game. I don't see a website either.

Next, your Moddb description. It's very vague and doesn't give much information. Compare with Cry of Fear and you can see a lot of eye candy and news articles with pictures. I understand that there's probably not much to show for a mobile game, due to file size issues, but I think a live-action ad would've worked like all of the mobile game's ads.

Now, onto the game. I don't have an Android device so I can only judge from your video. The game looks pretty difficult to figure out, compared to Candy Crush or Angry Birds - do you have a short 10 second tutorial in the beginning of the game? If not, I'd highly suggest to do so. On the plus side, it seems you can play it only with one hand so you got that one design rule right for sure. Aside from that, your game looks pretty good.

Notice that I said "pretty good". It doesn't seem to innovate among the sea of endless apps. Maybe look at similar games and do one thing better than them, so you could have a higher chance of success.

But all the features in the world will not help you without good marketing. There could be the most amazing interactive novel of all time but unless I can find it in the first page of Google, I won't find it.

typically, with 24 by 7 gorilla marketing starting from just before the time of release, it will take at least a month for a game of mine that goes on to sell well to begin generating "buzz". and buzz comes before sales. with anything less than such "maximum effort" marketing, results will take longer or never appear at all.

the world won't beat a path to your door because you built a better mousetrap, if you don't TELL THEM ABOUT IT! <g>

it would be great if one could write a game, put it on google, apple, windows, steam, gog, etc and just sit back and collect checks. but making games involves R&D, product development and testing, MARKETING, and sales fulfillment. IE All four phases of the basic business cycle. unless you have a publisher, who typically handles marketing and sales fulfillment.

And in my case, this is with games that have little or no direct competition, which doesn't seem to be your case:

"What's more depressing is that (maybe subjective here) worse games are rocking with 1000 downloads(of which 400 are 5 star ratings, lol, you know the story ) ... "

If they are similar enough to say they are "better" or "worse", they are competition.

In my experience, the marketing budget is at least as large, and usually slightly larger, than the development cost.

So if you consider it would have cost you $100,000 to pay someone else to build the game you built, a reasonable marketing budget should also be around $100,000. Considering other costs, and that you want to turn a profit, your market research on the game should have shown that with that kind of time and investment, you could recover at least $300,000 in revenue.

One of the most common failings of small businesses is to not do the necessary market research. Marketing your game is not optional if you want to reliably succeed.

Otherwise, buy lottery tickets.

Thanks for the advice guys! This was helpful!

My experience with the Android market tells me that it's generally horrible. I released my first mobile game on Android first, and released a version for iPhone a few weeks later. My Android version had maybe 10 downloads. My iPhone version hit the top 20. Exact same game.

A big part of the reason is the Android market (at least at the time) had just dropped the "new releases" category, so everything that wasn't advertised was just shunted to the very bottom of the list - which meant people needed to scroll past 10,000 other games - deep into the "no stars/no reviews" area - which no-one does.

The "new releases" category on the Apple App Store was key to getting the first few downloads, and resulting positive reviews, higher rank, and then more downloads. I spend $0 on advertising. All i did was give away a few freebee codes to a site that hands them out, which probably helped get some positive reviews.