Gamasutra: Thierry Brochart's Blog - December numbers for Dream-Up games on the android market

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December numbers for Dream-Up games on the android market
by Thierry Brochart on 12/30/11 06:40:00 am Featured Blogs

8 comments

The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra's game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Exactly 4 months ago we (a French indie game developer, 'Dream-Up') started to publish our games on the android market

It's the end of the year so it's time to release the new numbers PLUS a graphic showing our income from advertisement, hoping it'll help our fellow indie game developers

What happenned since our last post is that we released 3 weeks ago 2 more games eXtreme MotoCross and Ambush Zombie. All of them were also developed with our DreamGame engine .
We are lucky that eXtreme MotoCross is our first title to reach 200.000 downloads for the free version. So numbers are finally less depressing :)

Number of installations

	paid	free
Ballon Shot	1	1235
Color Machine	1	571
CrazyBoat	19	31580
CrazyKartOON	152	53295
Humpback Whale	5	680
Izzie	7	2553
Wash Machine	16	3509
Acrobat Gecko	3	1253
DreamRace 4x4	55	62415
Acrobat Gecko Halloween	9	602
AddictWeen	0	1153
eXtreme MotoCross	88	201396
Ambush Zombie Christmas	0	3873

total	356	364115

Last time we had around 120,000 downloads, now we have 360,000 ... it has tripled!

Anyway, so we said downloads are up, and here is a graphic to show our income from advertisement (income in US$, per week, from all our free apps with Ads):

It seems that after all our efforts will pay :)

**IMPORTANT**
I'm not sure I'll publish more numbers as I have no clue if someone is interested... as no-one is posting comments and as I have no numbers of viewers on my blog here...
Please just post any comment if you'd like to see more numbers

Happy New Year to you all! :)

Comments


James Coote	30 Dec 2011 at 8:07 am PST

	The problem is that the screenshot of the graph messes with the page layout on the site here at gamasutra.com. I refreshed a couple of times before I realised it wasn't that the page hadn't loaded, it was just miles off the bottom of the screen I'm interested in the numbers though :) So much I read online seems to be just conjecture, so it is great to see actual numbers
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Heitor Sergent	1 Jan 2012 at 11:42 am PST

	I really like to see actual numbers too, and it's nice to see an indie developer growing :). What Ads SDK are you guys using? And that graph shows the revenue from one week, do you have a similar graph since you started?
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Thierry Brochart	13 Jan 2012 at 1:40 am PST

	Hi, I use AdMob because mainly it is own by google, so easier in my humble opinion, plus I like the way theyu fill in with AdSense when no ads is available, better fill rate... but I believe other companies give better rates? As for the numbers, yes I'll give the numbers from the start right after I answered this message, I'll write a new blog entry :)
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Micah Betts	1 Jan 2012 at 10:19 pm PST

	I am definitely interested the numbers, thanks so much for posting this sensitive data, everyone isn't willing to do this. I'm currently in the midst of developing a mobile game so this has helped me a lot in getting a ballpark for success.
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Lennard Feddersen	2 Jan 2012 at 10:09 am PST

	Am I missing something basic here? You are touting success but if I'm reading things correctly you are making a little more than $100 per title you release?
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Thierry Brochart	13 Jan 2012 at 1:37 am PST

	Hi Lennard, yes I know it's not a lot, this is why I publish my numbers, no bullshit I can hear around. But if you look at the number more closely you should take into consideration that I have faith in the growth of those numbers, not the actual numbers.
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tony oakden	2 Jan 2012 at 5:19 pm PST

Thanks Thierry, That's really useful and it's extremely generous of you to post this sort of information on line. It seems that the majority of the income is coming from adverts? Is there any point in doing a paid version of the game at all? Seems like a lot of work for a very small income. By "paid" do you mean selling a one of paid version of the game or some sort of freemium service for additional content? Have you looked at alternative income methods? I'm interested because I'm about to release my first Android game and I'm trying to decide how best to commercialise it. All the information I have suggests that doing free and paid versions of a game is not the right thing to do in today's market.


Thierry Brochart	13 Jan 2012 at 1:36 am PST

Hi Tony, thanks for your comments. Yes we are wondering if a paid version is really needed, mainly because of the hassle to maintain 2 versions Paid and Free (we already have 18 titles, it makes 36 app to manage. The other reason is that it doesn't pay off AND it offers an opportunity for hackers to get it (because even if we implemented the security system googles offers, I see everyday scores on our online highsystem that comes from china where we do not sell our games, and anyway a lot more scores from paying version than we ever sold!...) But the reason I'm thinking it is worth it is that our numbers of sold version of our games is growing when the title gets known, this is the case with eXtreme MotoCross, almost 50 euros the first 3 weeks, it's not a lot I know but it is growing...