Postmortem of a commercial failure: My first Android Game App
In this postmortem from 2012, @irrlichthn candidly breaks down the dissolution of their startup, examining the fatal assumptions, misallocated resources, and market dynamics that led to its shutdown.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early signals were often rationalized away instead of prompting an immediate pivot in distribution or pricing.
The psychological toll of running out of capital compounds operational friction in a solo or small team setup.
Key Antidote: Validate paying willingness before committing months to building sophisticated product features.
Community Debate Themes:
Community discussions on HN centered on identifying product-market fit early, avoiding vanity metrics, and the emotional recovery process after shutting down.
CATEGORY Postmortems & Failures →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 41 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 23 comments
Personally, I view The side-scrolling space shooter genre as a niche market. People who enjoy and seek out S^4 games are looking for either a 'bullet hell' game like Ikaruga(1) or a nostalgic game like R-type(2). Side-scrollers are great game design practice, but the market is full of very discerning customers that would much rather pay 5$ for an emulator than buy an unpolished, depth-less, programming experiment.
I do not say this to bash the game. I have a list of android apps I hope to program, and a side-scroller is halfway down that list. At the top of that list is a tip calculator. It would be foolish to charge 10 cents for a tip calculator. I would be even more foolish to draw broad conclusions from the very small number of sales. But the most foolish thing I could do is call it quits before I get to the apps in my list that don't exist in the market in a dozen variations.
(1) http://youtu.be/EGNSdcy-apU?t=2m30s ↗
(2) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotemu.rtype ↗
I don't know if you have tried this, but I did with my app, that I release 4 weeks ago:
Show the user a dialog after 3 days of use (I additionally make sure that the app has been opened at least 5 times) asking him or her to review your app on google play if he enjoyed using it and you will upgrade his app to the pro version for free.
You can't check if the user actually reviewed your app, or if the user gave it a good or a bad review, but I had good experiences with that. That's a simple mechanic that will get you some nice reviews, because a user that regularly uses your app after 3 days probably wont hate your app. :-)
You can easily compare the result of this by checking this link to my app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster ↗
We are both in the same category of downloads (between 1k and 5k - I currently have 1,7k downloads) and its 47 reviews vs 8.
I had never seen this game, or heard anything about it. Your first enemy is obscurity.
Now I've downloaded your game and played it. Here are my thoughts:
- It blares music at you as soon as you run it. Bad first impression.
- No tutorial, no introduction, no obvious help function.
- There's a slowly descending purple-and-black background and a lot of green rain. Oh, look, there are some flyspecks at the top of columns of rain. I put my finger on the screen, and a new column of rain starts falling upward. Oh! It's a shooter, and if I'm shooting up, then the rain must be... whoops, I'm dead.
Flyspecks? Yeah, it looks like you don't bother detecting screen density and changing the graphics accordingly. I can't see anything interesting on a 300dpi screen.
There's nothing to suggest that the gameplay is innovative, or surprising. Does it get better later? Or even different?
Like dsr_, I had never seen this game before, and he is totally right saying that your lack of promotion is a mistake. I just tried it, and I spent nearly 15 minutes shooting the bad guys. I believe it has a bit of potential.
You should give it a try with a real promotional effort, bigger objects (I can barely distinguish enemies on my screen (KDDI pantech is06 for info)), and an ad-supported model. Even though this may not be the next angry birds, you can definitely get away with more than 16euro if you promote your game correctly.
Some of the more successful indie games tend to market well before release in order to stir up interest in the game. Would Minecraft have been as successful if Notch just kept quiet and released a paid copy instead of releasing an alpha after a few days of development so everyone could talk about this new cool new sandbox game being developed? Probably not.
Given the ease at which you can post information on the internet these days, this should be a no-brainer for any modern developer.