Mobile Income Report #2 - July 2014 (monthly income report from Android, iOS, Tizen, bada, ... games)

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previous parts
  Mobile Income Report #1 - June 2014
  Mobile Income Report #0 - Portfolio (what are my assets?)

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 Under Income Report #0 you can see my portfolio. It is list of the games that are then reported in Income Reports. The portfolio is regularly updated with new information (releases for new platforms, new updates, ...)

What I did in July

• as we met Amzon Developer Select conditions we got 500k ads to promote our Fruit Dating. The promotion campaign was scheduled for July. Here are the results:

  As you can see we really got promised 500k ads. The average clickthrough rate was less then 0,5%. This was not surprise for me as I expected something like this. It is more or less similar to clickthrough rate when I am on the publisher side. What is not shown in chart is the conversion rate - to how many purchases those  2327 clicks led. And truth is so, that in July we sold only 1 copy of the game.
 This is really bad. But as time flows it looks that this game is not for masses. It is puzzle game and while it has cute and modern graphic, it has rather oldschool gameplay difficulty. The puzzles really are not easy. It may be worth to try to focus on some special segment of players, like some puzzle clubs or so.
 Anyway, it is experience again. We got promotion campaign for free. Of course we had to meet the conditions. Most important was, that the game must run on Kindle Fire HDX without any stretching of the graphics. Kindle HDX has screen resolution 2560x1600. The advice is: if you want to fulfill this condition, create your graphics at least for this resolution. Yes, it is terribly big. But downscaling is easy, while upscaling is often impossible.

• if speaking about Fruit Dating, I have to mention that for more or less week we were featured at Slideme.com. Here is shot of the screen to keep this memorable moment for future generations:

• in second half of the July we finally finished big update of Shards - the brickbreaker. In the update 10 new levels has been added (60 levels in total now), added 2 types of glassy enemies - Shardiens - and added various graphical effects. Most noticeable one is that Shardiens distort space when destroyed:
  

  I also corrected some bugs in ads networks manager in the game code. This decreased the number of errors and thus reduced bad ratings. Current rating at google Play is 3,84 and I hope it will reach 3,85 soon, which is often displayed as 3,9 rounded. The best review of the month for paid Android version I got from Amazon user fjk who wrote: "I bought Shards on a whim. It turns out it to be the best brickbreaker I have. The controls are excellent, and the 60 screens are terrific. Give it a try."

• on 25th July we finally passed Apple's approval process and Shards is now at iTunes! It is only short time there now. To support it I sent free promo codes to various iOS games forums. Unfortunately, none of the users wrote any review nor gave any rating to the game. I got one 5* rating from Goofy2527 who bought the game: "This has quickly jumped into my top five brick breakers. Smooth controls, great level design and simply gorgeous to look at! A real joy to play! Thanks devs and here's five stars you truly deserve! " Words like this and previously mentioned comment are the ones that makes you happy and increases your motivation.

 As a conclusion of this part I have to say, that it is really hard to let the world know about your game...

Report

 Here are figures for paid apps for July:

 There is decrease in total downloads from 34 to 26. But the earnings increased from $23,5 to $40,7. It is mainly thanks to Shards launch on iOS at iTunes. The decrease is in bada OS downloads. No wonder, bada is dead system now.

 The most profitable was Shards. It increased its share from 71% in June to 80% in July. The game has good user reviews and we plan to add new levels. I hope to attract more new users.

 For the ads supported versions the July was bad month. The income decreased from $138,4 to $118,6. The decrease continued from June and lasted till half of the July. Then we released update of Shards and the trend turned.

 Most of the earnings came from Chartboost again. We prefer this network in our ads networks manager. From July the manager also supports Amazon interstitials. These are first fallback if Chartboost fails to load ad. Amazon ads are available in US and some limited number of European countries. So if this also fails then AdMob is selected. AdMob is the last one as the earnings are lowest, but on the other side it works as great safe network because it is available almost every time.

 So, total income for July = $40,7 + $118,6 = $159,3 (-1,6% compared to June Report)

 It is currently far from my mid-term target which is $750.

Next?

 From 1st August there is 2 moth period with guaranteed $6 CPM at Amazon for apps newly implementing their interstitials. I implemented these ads into free version of Deadly Abyss 2, but I do not expect any big traffic.
 I am still studying C#, Objective-C and Unity.
 There are still some opportunities how to utilize current games - for example convert Fruit Dating for iOS, HTML5, ...
 It is almost time to think about new game!