2012 in review

Well 2012 was an interesting year for Mayhem Software. Between 1/1/2012 and 31/12/2012 our metrics were as follows:

Downloads

• Total Downloads: 115,721.
• Total paid: 40 ($0.99/unit) 

Advertising

• Total Ad Impressions: 18,181,985 
• Total Revenue: 4,967.55
• eCPM: 0.27

It was a roller coaster year with some very promising moments but it was ultimately financially disappointing.  $5000 split between the two of us covered our costs and resulted in a nice bit of spending money but it certainly won't pay the rent.

We had a promising 3 months period whereby revenue was between $700 and $1200 / month. Unfortunately pubcenter eCPM has dropped significantly since then and we are now only making about $250-300 / month even though the number of ad impressions we're getting is roughly the same.

The most important lesson we learnt is to beware of relying purely on advertising for revenue as the returns are very volatile.  It still hurts to see us consitently reaching about 2 million impression / month and yet seeing an eCPM below 0.10, when 6 months earlier it was averaging 5-10 times that.  It is for this reason that we are currently moving away from pubcenter and experimenting with other advertising networks.  The nokia ad exchange is looking particulalry promising and we're currently awaiting approval for an account so we can test it out.

So based on the above 2013 will be about diversifying our business as much as possible by attacking multiple revenue models, advertising networks and platforms. We've got some great app ideas and are looking forward to getting them out over the coming months.

Our latest app view tube is out

Our new app view tube is out.  It basically allows the uer to search our three favourite video sites in one action and easily compare the results. 

The user just types in a search term and the app combines the results from youtube, vimeo and daily motion into a pivot control.

 

So far the results have been very promising.  On it's first day in the marketplace it got about 1500 ad impressions which is not a bad start.  Hopefully tomorrow is even better.
Check it out here.

Timezone converter featured in Vodafone top apps

I just found out that our app Timezone Converter was featured as a windows phone top app on the vodafone australia blog. 

Check it out here.

Finally in top 50 in USA and Britain

I just checked and Snowball Ninja finally made it into the top 50 free shooter apps in the USA and Great Britain.  This is good news as being a pubcenter ad supported app, these two markets along with Germany and Italy seem to pay the best eCPM (rate per 1000 impressions).

Some of our latest marketplace rankings are:

Finland - 18th
Australia - 26th
USA - 45th
Italy - 47th
Great Britain - 48th
Germany - 48th

We were just accepted for bizspark

Today we got a couple of emails letting us know that Mayhem Sofware has been accepted into Microsoft Bizspark program which provides support to startups.

The introduction email says we get the following benefits.:

1. Get your free software
2. Profile your solutions
3. Market your stuff
4. Find funding
5. Find offers and connect with others
6. Build your team
7. Access Training and support


One thing we're going to find useful is 2 years / $60,000 worth of  Windows Azure hosting. 

Resource	Monthly Benefit
Compute	1,500 hours of a Small Instance
Storage	30 GB
Storage Transactions	2,000,000
SQL Azure	5 GB
Access Control Transactions*	500K
Service Bus	3,000 hours
Cache	128 MB cache
Data transfers (WW)	35GB Out Free In

 Having worked at two previous start-ups I know that companies need to carefully consider their product and hosting choices. Something we've been careful to avoid is what used to be called the slashdot effect.  This is a situation whereby a strartup's web product gets a sudden boost in exposure and their hosting package cannot match demand.  Therefore we've been avoiding making apps that rely heavily on third party hosting.  When choosing a leaderboard solution for our new game Snowball Ninja I did a fair bit of research and was luckily to find mogade which offers a free and seemingly scalable online leader board solution.

So with 2 years/$60,000 of Azure hosting expect to see some cloud based windows phone and windows 8 apps being developed by us in the near future.

Snowball Ninja continuing to climb marketplace rankings

Version 1.1 of our new game Snowball Ninja was released 2 days ago and we're happy to see it steadily climbing rankings for free shooter games in the windows phone marketplace.

Current rankings for some major markets are as follows:

Finland - 20th
Australia - 30th
Turkey - 35th
The Netherlands - 37th
Italy - 46th
Spain - 45th
Germany - 47th
Ireland - 48th
India - 48th
China - 49th
Great Britain - 52nd
Russia - 53rd
Canada - 55th
Mexico - 57th
USA - 58th
France - 69th
Japan - 72nd

Click here to check it out!

How to market windows phone games

Last week our new game snowball ninja hit the windows phone marketplace so since then most of our time has been spent on marketing activities promoting it.  At this stage it seems our strategy has been fairly effective as the game is ranked between 20-60 in most major windows phone marketplace regions, for free shooter games.

ranked 28th

Getting the game into the top 50 lists has been our immediate goal (more-so than making short term revenue) as the most important ingredient in the ascendancy of some of our other successful apps has been making it into the top 50 for a particular marketplace category.  Once an app reaches this level it has a very good chance of maintaining it's place as the level of visibility you get for a top 50 app is huge. 

Our marketing strategy
Here's a few marketing tips we came up with for developers of windows phone games.  It's based purely on our intuition and the experience we gained marketing snowball ninja over the last week.

Make your game interesting and addictive:
This goes without saying. If your game sux no amount of marketing is going to be worthwhile.  Making it as "sticky" as possible should always be in the back of the game designers mind.

A couple of weeks ago I was tossing up whether to include a leaderboard for Snowball Ninja or include it in an update at a later stage. I knew it was important but having spent quite along time developing the app the urge to get it out was hard to overcome.  In the end I decided to include it which delayed the apps release by 3-5 days.  I'm now convinced I did the right thing by including it as this has been a major ingredient in users coming back again and again.  I can see this when I check the overall leaderboard and notice that many of the same users are returning each day and fighting it out for top spots.

Chose a category for which new games are less frequently released?
If your game could fit into multiple categories choosing a category for which new games are less frequently released can be an effective strategy.  This is because when your game is released it will spend longer at the top of the "new" list in its category resulting in better visibility and more downloads. 

Choose a title that contains words that are frequently searched for
A while ago I saw a game with a strangely familiar title.  I think it was something like "angry ninjas vs fruity birds".  I assume the author was hoping their game would show up when users search for popular games such as fruit ninja or angry birds. To me this seemed a bit tacky but I understand the developers reasoning.

In our experience Title seems to be weighted much higher in regards to marketplace search than the keywords entered when submitting a game to the marketplace. It has also recently been revealed in msdn forums that only the first 5 keywords entered are actually used in the marketplace.

I actually wanted to call our game snowball bandit which I think sounds better and is probably more appropriate but ended up going with snowball ninja as ninja is such a popular search term.

Beta test your game
Beta testing has 2 great advantages.  Firstly you will get a much higher quality game by acting on the feedback you get from your beta testers.  In addition beta testers become great evangelists for your game.  They show the game to their friends and are likely to tweet about it.  I got some great feedback from my beta testers and all of them have been nice enough to tweet about my game which I'm sure has been an ingredient in its success.
If you're having trouble finding beta testers try  http://www.wpbetaportal.com

Pay for advertisements
We paid for the following advertisement on 1800 Pocket PC which is an excellent site operated by George Saijo and dedicated almost exclusively to windows phone news.  Apparently over the course of a month you can expect about 50K-100K impressions for the type of advert we purchased which came to $100.

Try to get reviews and write-ups
Getting bloggers to write about your apps is a great way to get attention that will result in more downloads.  So far we have had two reviews / write ups which have helped increase our exposure.


The first can be found here on bestwp7games.com and the second was on the dutch blog pocketinfo_nl.  It can found here in dutch and here in english.


-You can submit your game to bestwp7games for a review or press release by visiting this page.
-Another good option is wmpoweruser where developers can write an article about their game.  This can be done here.

Ad exchange networks
Ad duplex is a great way to increase awareness of your apps.  Essentially you agree to serve ads for other apps in your application and in return ads for you own app are shown in other participating applications.

After reading about how taptitude used ad duplex to help increase their exposure we decided to make this part of our strategy.  So as soon as Snowball Ninja was submitted I set about updating the rest of our apps to support ad duplex.  For some I implemented a web service which allows me to remotely control whether ad duplex is used exclusively or only when a pubcenter advert fails to load.

Over the past 3 days we have served over 130K adverts in the ad duplex network and received over 110K back. (See screenshot below)

Write about your game on social media sites
This is another no brainer.  Get out their and write about your game.  Tweet about it. Post links on facebook. Write blog posts about it. The more you write about it the more exposure you will get and therefore the more downloads you will get. 

I was able to connect with all my beta testers as well as the two bloggers who did write-ups on Snowball Ninja through twitter.  So this was definitely an essential part of our marketing strategy.

Has a strategy like this worked for you?  Do you have other ingredients in your marketing strategy.  Please tell us about it by leaving comments or hitting us on twitter.