by Jörg | Jun 1, 2016 | News, Reports
Hi everybody! In my last post I talked about Bloo Kid 2s recent success on Amazon Underground. Now, two months later, the story continues, with both the free Underground version and the premium Fire TV version picking up steam. For those of you not familiar with the Amazon Underground revenue modell I suggest the following read: Amazon Underground Amazon Underground Downloads Downloads went down a bit at the end of May, but we are still very happy with 31k downloads in the last two months. Especially with >250 downloads daily and multiple peaks over 750. Amazon Underground Usage Time Even with less downloads in May, the engagement time went up. People were playing over 4,300,000 minutes of Bloo Kid 2 during the last two months, with about 60k-80k a day! Wow! Remember that amazon pays you for every minute of user engagement. Fire TV Sales Ever since downloads on Amazon Underground increased, the sales for the Fire TV stick version increased as well. I can only guess why this is happening. Underground is not available on Fire TV, and some people might see the Underground app as some evil data kraken (not necessarily from R’lyeh though). So maybe people see that the game is popular on underground and then buy it on Fire TV. 2k people bought the game during the last two months, and the daily sales seldom drop below 20. Revenue Those are some pleasantly surprising numbers. Revenue-wise, this means: Underground: $8.515 Fire TV Sales: $6.240 Total: $14.755 That’s nearly $15k for just two months, making Amazon the most profitable platform at the...
by Jörg | Mar 22, 2016 | News, Reports
Hi folks! Today I wanna talk to you about: Amazon Underground Some of you may have heard the recent success stories of Halfbrick, Coffe Stain Studios or developers I did not even know existed making more revenue on underground than everywhere else. The only way for me to find out if this is all marketing or if there’s some truth behind it was to try it myself. As mentioned in my last blogpost, Bloo Kid 2, among some of our other apps, has been released on Amazon Underground a while ago. It took some time until this version picked up steam, but today I am going to present you some very promising numbers. For those unaware of the amazon underground program, here is a short excerpt from amazon: [pullquote align=”full” class=”” cite=”amazon.com” link=”https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground” color=”#f9982a” size=”12″] […] Amazon Underground includes a new monetization model where Amazon pays developers based on the amount of time your app is used. With Amazon Underground, you can turn 100% of your Android users into revenue generating customers. You get paid starting from the very first minute your Amazon Underground app is used, and you will continue to be paid for every minute of use by every customer in exchange for you waiving your normal download or in-app fees.[/pullquote] As I said, I ported some of my kid’s apps and Bloo Kid 2 to Amazon. For the latter, it was quite easy because I already integrated GameCircle for the Amazon FireTV version. Downloads Below you can find the current download numbers. The yellow line is for Bloo Kid 2, the lines close to zero are for all the other...
by Jörg | Nov 20, 2015 | News, Reports
Hi all, it has been quiet here for too long now… You probably have noticed that I was busy porting Bloo Kid 2 to more target platforms. I was also experimenting with some other things like Amazon Underground, but this will follow in a (soon to come) blogpost. Today I want to focus on presenting you a complete revenue breakdown of Bloo Kid 2 on all platforms where the game is available at the moment. Since there are still more platforms to port the game to, I will update this post as soon as there is enough information available for more insight on the sales. A short prelude For the sake of completeness, here is a very short summary about the game. Bloo Kid 2 is a retro-style platformer that was developed with the Monkey-X cross-platform programming language. It was first released for mobile devices and later ported to a number of different platforms. So here comes the list (in chronologic order) Please understand that some platform holders do not allow to make sales numbers or other sensitive data public, so I must spare some details. But I bet you can always do the maths to see the whole picture. iOS App Store Release 03/06/2014 Out since 662 days Downloads to date 143.000 Revenue to date $14.694 The iOS version is free with ads. I use Vungle video ads between the levels for monetization. Users can remove the apps via in app purchase ($1.99). This is also the version that took the most time to complete, because it was basically the “full game”. I worked...
by Jörg | Mar 27, 2015 | News, Reports
Hi all! As promised, I will be posting “developer reports” again. The only difference is that I will not name them “Developer Report [month][year]”, since I cannot promise that there will be somthing to write about each month. Or there will be two interesting things to write about in one month at times. As of today. Two topics. One post. Total confusion…. (I just want to compensate for the long silence, hence the information overflow in this post). I wanted to name this blogpost “Windows Phone and the Price of a Cheap Translation” first, but this would be misleading. These are two separate topics that have nothing in common, and I will start with the first right away: Windows Phone There are many different stories of whether it pays off to port your mobile app to WP or not. Some apps see huge financial success, like Taptitude (read the success-story here). Other reports paint a more or less abysmal picture of WP like the (one year old…) comparative report here. As always, the truth is somewhere in between, and can be different for everyone. So here are my two cents: Bloo Kid 2 on WP Since the Monkey-X Framework I used to create Bloo Kid 2 already supports WP, it did not take much time to consider the port (and to even port it). So my advice as always at this point: Choose your framework wisely. There are enough “engines” out there today that every aspiring developer should be aware of, so pick your favorite one carefully. Multi-Platform coverage should have a high priority in my opinion. You...
by Jörg | Jul 30, 2014 | Reports
Time flows like a river… (and history repeats…) It is time for another blogpost. Bloo Kid 2 has been out in the wild for quite some time now (it has already received an update by now!). And its revenue is finally starting to increase towards something that I would call successful. Time to share some numbers with you! To my greatest surprise (and satisfaction equally), Bloo Kid part one is still making a lot of ad-revenue up to this day. Have a look at the charts below to see the correlation between installs, daily active users, video-impressions, eCPM and revenue for Bloo Kid 1 + 2 iOS (Android revenue is just a fraction of the iOS revenue, hence I’ll go without it). Bloo Kid ~2.000-3.000 installs per day ~10.000-12.000 daily active users. That “anomaly” between May and June is a tracking problem at Vungle I assume. Those DAUs create about 8.000-16.000 video views a day eCPM is $7.00 to $12.00, which I would regard as “pretty high” And finally, these 8k-16k views generate about $75.00 to $175.00 revenue a day The following is a combinated chart showing all the above curves in one diagram. It looks a bit confusing at first, but you should get the point once you have a closer look at it. Judging from the above chart, you can see two things: Somehow, everything depends on everything. The days where downloads and DAUs are high, views and revenue are high as well. Even though this is no big surprise, it is good to know that, “having twice the users” roughly translates to “having about twice the...
by Jörg | Apr 8, 2014 | Reports
I finally managed to come out of hiding! The last weeks have been quite turbulent and less productive, so I was not able to write any blogposts. I did not even have much things to write about. You may have noticed that the “Headline” of the blogpost is slightly different from what you are used to. I do no longer try to maintain the illusion that I can write a blogpost every single month… Apologies for that. Family and work demand a lot of time at the moment, so I have to switch to a “I write a post when there is something to write about”-mentality. I will still try to write at least every other month, I just cannot guarantee. So far for the introduction. Now let’s get to the interesting part. Shortly before the release of Bloo Kid 2 iOS I wrote a small summary about Bloo Kid. Today I want to turn over a new leaf of the Bloo Kid success-story. GameStick The GameStick is a new micro-console in the vain of the OUYA that brings Android games to the TV screen. I was contacted by someone from gamestick after he stumbled across Bloo Kid 2 in the toucharcade forum. They asked me to do a port of the game. I said I would first want the game to be content complete (== 5 worlds instead of the current 3) but I could think of porting Bloo Kid 1 instead. Corona supports GameStick (and OUYA) by now, so I figured I would be able to port the game with minimum effort. They sent me a devkit...
