Mobile Income Report #1 - June 2014 (monthly income report from Android, iOS, Tizen, bada, ... games)

 On 1st June 2014 I left my previous job and became true Indie game developer. It is big adventure and I started this series of Income reports to share my experience with other small developers.

 If you are interested what are my games like, you can see detailed Portfolio here. The portfolio page will be regularly updated.

What I did in June

•  I was working on adjustments of our games. The main one is prepared set of new levels for Shards - modern Arkanoid / Breakout game. Lot of players asked for more levels, so we made adjustments to add them easily. Jupiter who is responsible for graphics and levels created set of 10 new ones. The total number is 60 now. We also added Shardiens - glassy enemies that are spawn from hives. Both enemies and hives can be destroyed and when this happens it affects the screen space with distortion effect. The update will be published in July.

• iOS version is finally coming - most of the work was done and I hope it will get published in July,
• we adjusted Fruit Dating to support 2560x1600 screens without stretching images and published it at Amazon store. Thanks to this we reached the Developer Select program and we got 500k ads impressions campaign to promote this game. The campaign is scheduled for July,
• although my games are for Android (beside other OS systems) I am not Android programmer. So in June I took deep studying of Android programming. I want to do the same for iOS in July. My target is to be able to write not only games, but also non-game apps,
• beside this I am learning Unity for 2D game programming.

Report

 Now to numbers. Below is table summarizing earnings from paid versions. It does contain any iOS and Tizen versions yet as iOS version of Shards will be published in July and Tizen OS was not launched yet (its planned July launch in Russia was postponed by Samsung - developers were not given any explanation).

 Total $23,5 is not much really. It is even less if I say that this poor profit from our games will be split among other teammates who were working on the games with me.

 The most profitable was Shards. It is funny that bada - dead OS system - made the same amount as Android.

 Here is income from free versions that contain ads or in-app purchases to remove ads:

 Currently the highest income is from Chartboost ads. We use these interstitail ads during game start and then from time to time between levels. If Chartboost inventory is empty then full screen interstitial is requested from AdMob. AdMob and Amazon are currently used mainly for banners - AdMob works as safety belt for interstitials. The income from Tapjoy is very very low. We implemented it only into Fruit Dating as the other way how player can earn in-game currency (stars). If player is stuck with logical puzzle he can purchase the solution for previously earned stars and if he does not have enough of it he can earn some by watching video ads. As the number of downloads is low the Tapjoy traffic is also low. So, I do not see the problem in Tapjoy network.

 So, total income for June = $23,5 + $138,4 = $161,9.

Next?

 In July I will report experience with Amazon Developer Select campaign. I hope Shards will pass validation procedure at iTunes. It would be great for Tizen developers to finally know when it will be launched. I will continue in my Android / iOS / Unity / Objective-C / C# studies.