Hi,
Any one has experience with featured game on Google Play, or has reference to relevant blogs?
what is the chances to get game featured? how many downloads it derive?
same question regarding Open Beta Featured?
should we try it apply for it ourself, or we should use some publisher? any? what expected cost for using publisher?
Thank you
We applied directly for an Indie game partnership with Google. Got accepted, but don’t know if it made a difference.
Submitted two games to Apple for featuring and have gotten Game of the Day features on both, and they were a big deal.
On time with a publisher, one time without. Most publishers want 25% to 50% but it’s negotiable depending on how much money and effort they put in.
I’d like to continue on @ponywolf’s point about publishers.
That 25% to 50% also depends on their perceived risk, your developer profile, the quality of the game, but most importantly, your game’s monetisation options and their perceived profitability as well as longevity.
For instance, unless your game looks and feels good and has a clear and exploitable revenue model, then 99.99% of publishers probably aren’t interested even if they got 100% of the revenue. No one simply “uses a publisher”. You need to apply and show that you are a worthwhile partner with a product, or rather, with a service that the publisher can sell and monetise over a long period of time, i.e. you need a solid game as a service.
When you have more of a developer profile, i.e. your name carries some weight and you have an established customer base, then the perceived risk is reduced and you’d get away with more creative pursuits, but as a developer without any name recognition, all customer acquisition operations would essentially fall on the publishers shoulders.
Finally, the important thing is that IF you don’t have a UA strategy with a sufficient budget and/or an existing customer base, then even if a publisher would take 50% of your game’s revenue, it’s likely that you’d make more than if you went at it alone. Just a friendly piece of advice, you shouldn’t count pennies when there’s real profit yet to be had.
Well said. I way oversimplified it and should have mentioned that we are at a point where we can self-launch and deliver a lot of what a smaller publisher would do. Not everyone is in the same boat.
With market knowledge, decent dev ops and much analytics you can do what a publisher would and keep all the profit. How far you succeed depends entirely on your skills and available budget.
FYI less than 1% of all submissions will ever get published (most are simply ignored at the first look).
One publisher once proposed 80% 20% on their advantage for me. Didn’t work.
Most publishers dealing with small developers offer 50%. The bigger your game is, the more negoatiable is the percentage.
If you have an UA/marketing team with knowledge you don’t need a publisher, but they might be interesting to some developers.
@anon63346430 Indeed, but often the case with small (and especially new) developers is that they lack the knowledge, strategies and most importantly, the budget, for effective user acquisition.
Having even 20% of a 5-7 digit revenue is still much more than 100% of a 1-3 digit revenue. There’s also the added benefit of building your reputation and experience on the side and perhaps putting that money and experience aside for the next project.