Hello to everyone who is still awake
Perhaps you donāt remember me, but about a year ago I wrote an article on HabrĆ©, how I used my YouTube channel with 8K subscribers and a budget of 0 rubles to get sales of my computer game. I canāt say that the experiment turned out to be successful, but I still got a certain result and experience. In short, I have a Flamingo game development channel that was created to get media and facilitate marketing of my games. Stylish trendy youth. If you are too lazy to read the last article, then from a simple 2D platformer for $ 2 on Steam and a couple of YouTube videos about it with 8K subscribers - I then received somewhere around $ 450 for the first month. Further sales declined. I thought it was not bad for the first game and scored on it, its development and advertising. I didnāt do any updates or port on mobile phones, although the audience really asked.
A year has passed
Over the year, the audience has grown slightly after some experiments on the channel. Now I have ~ 200K subscribers, and you are probably wondering: "What kind of feedback can I get from this audience?" Not bad at all, I tell you. Now you yourself will understand everything. With the growth of the channel, I gained some good advertisers for myself and started selling ads in each video + monetization of all videos. Already this was enough to live comfortably, but I wanted to entertain the audience more not with video, but with my games. This is closer to me. For myself, I concluded that the market for PC and PS games is well kept by large studios, which for a year, or even more, lick their products for sales and marketing. I donāt have that much time. Maybe I'm from that young generation who want everything at once, so I decided to create my first mobile game for Google Play and improve this experience. Well, I opened Adobe Illustrator, be patient, grabbed coffee and started drawing graphics for the game. I simultaneously made different videos about its development in order to warm the interest of the audience. The videos began to gain a pleasant amount of views, which cannot but please me.
Big mistake
I am stupid. I immediately swung at a free mobile 2D shooter, ala Overwatch or Brawl Stars, without even making an ordinary Tetris first. I stepped on many pitfalls, such as optimizing the game, screen resolution, developing a difficult project alone and in a hurry. Once I came up with a rule for myself - to make games for no more than two months. Why? I was afraid that enthusiasm and zeal for the game would disappear. I was afraid that I would abandon the project or invest less in my development, but doing it in a hurry is even worse. As a result, I spent three months developing. Either Unity gave errors that I could sit for a week, I didnāt like any details in the gameplay and I changed them. Oh, how much time and nerve cells I spent. I already forgot about YouTube, because the priority was to finish the game. As a result, in a hurry and anger, turning a blind eye to the game, I finally publish an alpha version on Google Play called - Dusty the Great. I exhaled. Calmed down. It remains only to upload the finished videos to YouTube and run this download pipeline. I was wondering what would come of it in the end. But what can be good by publishing an unfinished game?
Startup and first income
I understood that the game might not reach the audience because of bugs, but the low number of nerve cells and time begged me to publish it and at least look at the opinions of people. Ok, I launch the trailer on YouTube, and then in a couple of days and the main video about its development, which collected almost half a million views in a couple of weeks. To begin with, I just want to say that only with the advertising integration and monetization of this one video I received $ 450, which can not be said about the income of the game. Yes, the effect of downloads was not bad, because in 5 days she collected 10K installations, and in a month a little more than 60K. At that time, the game came in second place in the most popular arcade games. Not bad, considering that this is a stream from one direct video. I did not do any more such videos about its development, because I decided to wait a pause. If you are interested in how much profit it has brought in a month with 60K instances, then please kindly look at the table with Unity Dashboard.
This is terribly small. This is not because the video did not sell the game. No, it just did its job well, but my inexperience and haste produced a product that got stuck in the rating of three stars on Google Play. The store doesn't care how many stars your game has. Even if the game will consistently receive 1 star and a bunch of angry reviews, but the game will be voraciously downloaded - Google will still promote it in its store. It also works with YouTube.
Epilogue
I decided to take a break longer and did not release the video for three months. I calmed down, rested, thought about further development and did this. First of all, my conscience tortured me and I made an update to the game, having patched the big holes of the first version. For example, one of them is a character health bar. Yes, in the shooter, I did not make a streak of lives. Now you understand how much I closed my eyes, wanting to release it to the masses as soon as possible? Having updated the game and another thematic video, it gave new installations, hope for the rehabilitation of the game and improved the rating to 4 stars. Well, at least something. In any case, YouTube reassured me, saying, āDonāt be afraid, Iāll feed and take care of you better than your game.ā Today, in addition to new experience, the game "Dusty the Great" brings me $ 3-5 per day and ~ 100 new installs. Perhaps I will release a couple more updates to this game to give it some form and handwriting, because I do not want to leave it unfinished, like my first PC game on Steam. I do not want to abandon the project, no matter in what condition it is. By the way, I have an idea to create my next mobile game with one of my subscribers and make an interesting video about it, but I suppose it will be a little later when I finish with this game.