Happy New Year, everyone! Before we get into the latest data from the iOS release (spoiler: lots of good news!), I wanted to give a quick update on the Android and PC update.
Android and PC update (click to toggle)
Android Beta
We started Beta testing Android just before Christmas by inviting testers through our newsletter. The interest has been absolutely astonishing – we received 1,300 applications within 3 hours (!) and over 2,500 applications overall. For comparison, our iOS Beta test received 625 applications so the interest in Android was four times as much.
Thanks to everyone who signed up we now have a good spread of devices and Android versions to test and the test has been going pretty well.
Android Release Date
We don’t have a firm release date yet but still plan to release this month. Stay tuned!
PC Update
Before Christmas, we published a Beta version to Steam which includes the new pirate mode. Our intention was to gradually port the rest of the features (new topics, story update and UI tweaks) to the Beta but the UI tweaks were so extensive and intertwined in other changes that we now plan to publish all of these features together (including updated modding support). We should have this ready for Beta at the time of the Android release and ready to be released as a general update (on Steam and elsewhere) a few weeks after that.
Now, onwards to the iOS report.
Sales
Our last report was just after Game Dev Tycoon got featured in the US (and UK) as Game of the Day and discussed the short-term impact of that feature showing a dramatic increase in sales and the hint of a fall back to pre-feature levels. As a reminder, this is what our sales graph looked like on Day 7:
We didn’t get around to writing part 4 before Christmas but now that the new year has started, we have even more data to show. Here is our latest sales graph showing 42 days on the App Store.
As you can see the feature gave a massive boost which lingered for about a week before sales fell quite dramatically to the lowest levels so far. Thankfully, the downward trend didn’t last long as Christmas Day gave a boost again and resulted in better sales throughout the holidays. We hope Game Dev Tycoon provided some relaxing holiday gaming! The new year started off well too with several feature placements in Europe (UK, France, Belgium) providing another spike – albeit much, much smaller than the first one – near the end of the graph.
Overall, Game Dev Tycoon on iOS has now sold 66,520 units bringing in 241,615 USD in proceeds. After the initial rough start this is simply amazing and means that we have now made back our investment of 190K and are looking at a pre-tax profit of 50K. – Thank you all for playing! š
Chart positions
Above you can see the chart positions (according to AppAnnie) and proceeds in the US market across the 42 days of sale. During the Game of the Day feature we made it to the Top 5 paid position for three days which was our best position and consequently resulted in the largest sales. Our best position in the Top Grossing charts was at position 265 which explains why the Top 100 Grossing charts barely ever have any paid apps in them. Freemium simply dominates the market.
What’s also interesting is just how steep sales fall once you step down the chart ladder. Below you can see the proceeds plotted against the chart positions.
At position 5, our best day, we saw around 15K proceeds. At position 6, only one step down(!), we made just half of that (53%), at position 17 we made only a third (27%) and once you hit the low 100s we were looking at around 4-6% of what we made on our best day.
Interesting outliers are due to generally increased sales during the holidays and weekends. On Christmas Day for example, we were at position 82 but this still saw around 22% of what we made on our best day.
While the difference in the Top 20 charts is simply massive, the difference in the lower numbers isn’t quite as dramatic. Our worst chart position at spot 186 had still about 86% of the sales of what we saw at position 102 so while it’s true that the very top paid apps make the majority of the sales, you can still make a sizable income at the lower end of the charts if you manage to hold your position over multiple weeks.
Ratings and Reviews
4.8 stars
iOS Release Report Nr. 4: Good News4.8
Our ratings on the App Store are still great with an overall rating of 4.8 and an incredible 4.9 in the US (beaten by Australia which sits at 5.0 at the moment). We are slowly trending towards a 4.9 overall which is just incredible.
It’s truly humbling to see just how much players enjoy our game. I’m also happy to say that most 1-star reviews are now based on opinion rather than technical issues so it seems that our latest patches have fixed nearly all problems with the game.
Likely Piracy
With all the good news out of the way, let’s take a look at some bad news. While we were stunned to see that iOS didn’t show any signs of piracy initially, we are now fairly confident that there is sizeable piracy at work. For a while Game Dev Tycoon was listed in the Top spot on several iOS piracy sites and it shows when we look at our usage data.
What you see above is a chart comparing our confirmed sales numbers with the number of unique (but anonymous) users our analytics software tracks. The difference between those numbers is a simplified view of potential piracy. As you can see the difference was zero for almost 5 days but once the Game of the Day popularity kicked in we can see a massive rise in the difference and for the last two weeks we see a fairly steady discrepancy of around ~55%. The latest data suggest that we have over 100K players, compared to around 66K sales.
Disclaimer: As I mentioned before, this is not to say that we have a guaranteed piracy rate of 55%. One legal purchase could be used on multiple machines (either through multiple devices by one person or through family sharing) but on the flipside, pirated versions could also block our tracking completely so there could be a much larger number of players that we simply don’t see. What is clear though is that piracy exists on iOS and is likely substantial.
It’s much easier to accept the effects of piracy once your product is profitable but I really wonder how the mobile market would look like if piracy of premium games was lower. Perhaps the Top Grossing lists and market direction wouldn’t so heavily favor freemium games?
It will be interesting to see how the Android release will compare. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait long to find out.
Until next time!
– Patrick
Greenheart Games š
You can comment on this blog post on our forum, here.
In the last report, we saw a steady increase in sales with day 2 growing by 7% and day 3 by another 11%.
Featured in the US
Day 4 saw us featured in several markets as well as receiving a much-coveted āGame of the Dayā feature in the US market. This is our first published game on the App Store but the idea we got from talking to other developers was that a feature in the US is essentially hitting the jackpot. Other than somehow managing to go viral (which we didnāt attempt), this is the best-case scenario for exposure within the App Store.
I should mention that Apple prepares these features well in advance and for new games they ask for at least 6 – 8 weeks lead time so the āGame of the Dayā feature was definitely not a reaction to our launch experience but planned ahead of time by Apple. In a later postmortem, weāll go into more detail of how we tried to make it easy for Apple editors to feature our game but while we were hopeful about a feature we did not know if, when or where such a feature would happen.
Since iOS 11, the āGame of the Dayā feature is not just a fancy banner that links directly to your product page but, instead, a multi-page article written about your game that tries to highlight what makes your game special. The Game Dev Tycoon feature is really well written and not only describes the general idea of the game (to run a game studio) but also manages to explain the entire gameplay arch elegantly. Unfortunately there is no web version I could link to but here are some choice excerpts:
To create your first game, pick a platform, topic, and genre, as well as specific elements ā like level design, graphics or sound- to focus on.
One-sentence tutorial: Done ā
Minutes later, your new game has launched (things move fast in this world), and you can see how crucial those decisions really were. Perhaps devoting resources to sound instead of dialogue limited the appeal of your mythological RPG. Or maybe it was choosing to build a rhythm-based adventure that doomed you from the start.
The Apple editor(s) really got Game Dev Tycoon and highlight the thought processes potential players would go through while playing the game.
Salaries, marketing, interviews, cost control. The bigger you are, the busier it gets. But itās worth it for the thrill of releasing a monster hit that earns 10 out of 10 reviews. Sounds like a great opportunity for a sequelā¦
The feature ends by highlighting what the progression of the game is and what late-game challenges it provides while also touching on the motivation that makes playing the game so rewarding.
As a developer, Iām used to describing Game Dev Tycoon and Iāve also seen a fair share of reviews of the game but this feature from the Apple editors is one of the best descriptions of what Game Dev Tycoon is about. I simply couldnāt have hoped for a better spotlight.
Our ratings from players in the US were are also very strong. We currently have a rating of 4.9 stars out of 869 reviews.
4.9 stars
iOS Release Report Nr. 3: Game of the Day!4.9
With all this good news, letās have a look what effect this had on our sales.
Sales
Sales (Units)
Est. Proceeds (USD)
Day 1
1,463
5,325.84
Day 2
1,568 (+7%)
5,692.57 (+6.8%)
Day 3
1,742 (+11%)
6,321.4 (+11%)
Day 4
5,161 (+196%)
18,793 (+197%)
Day 5
7,482 (+45%)
26,998 (+43%)
Day 6
7,477 (-0.06%)
27,104 (+0.4)
Day 7
5,513 (-26.2%)
19,963 (-26.3%)
When the feature kicked in on Day 4 we sold 196% more units than the day before and Day 5 saw another 45% increase. Day 6 saw much the same results but Day 7, our latest data point, shows a -26% drop in sales.
I am not sure if we can share conversion rates and impressions (will check with Apple and, if possible, share it in a future report) but, given the massive exposure the feature had, we hoped for a little more sales as a result. We donāt have data from other games as a comparison so we donāt know if this result is simply because Game Dev Tycoon is serving a niche in a mainstream market or if we made some mistakes on the Store page itself.
Whatever the reason, it is likely both our own fault and simply the market itself; we couldnāt have hoped for a better representation from Apple or our players and thus canāt complain. This feature gave us a much needed boost and put the game in a good spot in the charts which will hopefully guarantee us continued strong sales for a little while longer.
We topped the overall US charts at spot number 5 on Day 5 and, despite the nearly 26% drop in sales on Day 7, held that position. Interestingly, we never even got close to the Top 100 or even Top 200 Top Grossing charts, the closest we got was on Day 6 with a ranking of 265. This just highlights again what every mobile developer has always told us: the App Store is dominated by free-to-play games, donāt expect to hit a jackpot with a premium game. Thankfully for us, we didnāt port the game to hit a jackpot and with the new sales data it looks likely that the port will be profitable.
Possible Piracy Rates
In the past reports, we talked about a likely piracy rate of 0%. We are now getting some hints that this might be changing.
This graph compares the total confirmed unit sales (in blue) to the total tracked unique users via analytics (in orange). As you can see the first days the total unit sales where equal or bigger than the tracked users but starting with day 4, this changed and by day 7 we see a dramatic rise in the difference with 12% more players than sales. I don’t know how Unity analytics tracks unique users in detail, so it’s safer to assume that it doesn’t track legal installations on multiple devices or installations through family-sharing (which we support) as one single user. This could explain the difference but even if we can’t make a clear call of what’s piracy and what’s just legal usage, it will be interesting to see how this difference changes over time.
I should also mention that we have seen some activity on the web that suggests that there are illegal copies of the game in circulation. Depending on how these copies are cracked, pirates could potentially not show up in our analytics at all. We might be able to share more data on this in future reports.
Musings about Sales Targets and Taxes
After seven days, Game Dev Tycoon on the App Store has about $110K in proceeds which is nearly 58% of our investment. Unless there is a continued massive drop in sales (we hope not!), it looks very likely that we will make our investment back and if we can sustain our chart positions a while longer, we might make some profit too. š„
We will see if we can make enough to justify investing again in such a big premium game. The amount of income that is required for our business to develop a project like this is quite staggering. Current day taxation systems really arenāt ideal for businesses that have most of their profits in a single year but then consistent expenses in the years afterwards. Australia has a company profit tax of 30% which essentially means that, in order to make a game with $190K again, we need to aim for a profit of at least $271K ($271K – 30% = $190K). In other words, if we can’t invest in a new project in the same year that we make our profits in, we need to make 42.8% more money to spend the same amount again ($190 + 42.8% = $271K).
This brings our revenue target to close to half-a-million dollars or 128K full-priced unit sales. On one hand this is an overly cautious calculation because it assumes that we cannot offset any of our future expenses in the year we make the profit, but on the other hand it also assumes that all the initial investment is an expense in the same year you make your money back (which sadly isn’t the case for us). It also doesn’t plan for any kind of margin. If your next game then fails, which is statistically likely, you could still be out of funds and out of business.
Interestingly, this is pretty much the same reason why a lot of Game Dev Tycoon players go bankrupt at least once. They make a hit-game as a small team, make millions and then overstretch by growing too fast and trusting too much that the next game will be an equally big hit. Moments later they cannot pay their staff anymore, the bank comes knocking and Electronic Mass Productions buys their IP.
Thankfully, we have a buffer from the success of the PC version but itās no wonder indie studios donāt risk their money on expensive premium games much. It seems simply too risky. Hopefully for us, our growth curve will continue to be at least steady a little while longer and, together with the Android release, allow us to reach that goal.
If you haven’t seen Game Dev Tycoon on the App Store, you can check it out here or simply click on the image below.
It took me nearly a whole day to compile the first report so for the second report we already have data for the next two days after release. We also have some reactions to our first report and some clues of what the next days might hold but first let’s take a look at the data.
Sales
Sales (Units)
Est. Proceeds (USD)
Day 1
1,463
5,325.84
Day 2
1,568 (+7%)
5,692.57 (+6.8%)
Day 3
1,742 (+11%)
6,321.4 (+11%)
Day 2 and 3 showed a steady increase in numbers. Day 2 unit-sales grew 7% to 1.5K and day 3 saw another 11% increase to 1.7K units.
Piracy rates
Because we did not repeat our piracy experiment (see part 1 for reasons why), we cannot easily observe piracy rates. What we can do is compare our Unity analytics (essentially anonymous statistical data) with our purchase numbers.
Ordinarily I would caution that this is inherently imprecise and becomes more useless with each day as one legal purchase could be (legally) used on multiple devices and even by multiple people (we support family sharing both on Steam and on iOS) but looking at the data I should not have worried.
According to Unity analytics we had 3,572 new players across all three days. This stands against 4,773 sold units during the same period. This suggest a piracy rate of 0% and indicates that 25% of people who purchased the game havenāt had a chance to play it yet.
This is in stark contrast to our experience on PC ā Part of the reason we never published Day 2 stats for our piracy experiment was because by the time we looked at the data, there were so many players and so many pirates playing the real game (rather than our joke one) that it was impossible for us to make an insightful call to what the actual piracy rate was – well, other than saying still pretty high. It will be very interesting to see how this will play out in the next weeks and even more insightful to see how the Android release in January will compare.
More analytics
Sadly, our statistics for games created and bankruptcies inside the game have malfunctioned but here are some other fun stats we can share:
5,685 companies were created 3,328 bailouts were taken 1,511 companies reached the last office 1,169 staff were fired
Particularly noteworthy is that 26.5% of players reached the last office. This number is surprisingly high 3 days after release, especially since it takes around 7 to 12 hours to complete the game if you don’t go bankrupt (and most players go bankrupt at least once).
The last analytics number we proudly want to share is the number of in-app purchases sold so far š
(spoiler: it will remain at 0!)
Reception
After day 3, 250 players rated the game with an average of 4.8 stars which means our rating is keeping very steady.
4.8 stars
iOS Release Report: Day 2 and 3 ā Steady Improvements4.8
Most lower ratings are, as before, due to a problem where the game can stall on iPhone X (not everyone is affected but if you are, please try to logout from Game Center and then in again). ā We are deploying a fix for this right now but it still has to pass review.
On the press side, Pocket Gamer gave us a glowing review:
A stunning simulator that’s perfect for mobile – 9/10
Interestingly, this volatility is not reflected in our proceeds which is visible if we overlap the charts data with the proceeds from the US market.
Given the relatively small sample size here (we are still just talking about 1-2K units) this might just be natural fluctuation on the App Store but itāll be interesting to see how closely our proceeds will match our chart position.
Day 1 Report Reactions
Iād like to summarize and respond to some of the reactions we got to our Day 1 Report. First, the reaction from readers was very positive. Twitter in particular showed many tweets where people appreciated us for being so candid. Thanks to everyone who shared the story on Twitter or elsewhere! š
Newsletter
We sent out another newsletter last night and Iām happy to say that the open rate was better compared to our announcement post.
The click-rate in particular was more than double. As people pointed out yesterday, our announcement title was self-explanatory and didn’t mention new features so many readers simply marked the email as read once they read the subject.
We also received multiple emails that reported our newsletter landing in Google’s āPromotionsā tab which, I suspect, very few people actually read and has been dubbed āThe Death of Email Marketingā. Yes, our announcement was a promotion and is marketing but it’s a pity that Google would lump our once-a-year important email announcement into the same category as daily sales emails.
Others also reported seeing the newsletter in Spam which also surprised me because our Spam-report rate is very low (0.003% vs. industry standard 0.02%).
In the end I think we just have to accept that an open-rate of 40%+ of yesteryear is no longer feasible and also admit that there is room for improvement. I know our subject lines could be better, it’s a topic I struggle with because I really dislike click-bait subjects myself but there must be a better way to be both informative and interesting.
Budget
In our Day 1 Report we stated that Game Dev Tycoon iOS cost us 190K and a few people reacted to that saying that the budget is way over the top. I should start with saying that we budgeted for 120K, the rest was, well, unexpected but both we and the developers of the port Rarebyte believed that a good performing port needs to be of high quality. The game experience needs to feel right and not just be a function-by-function copy of the PC version.
I think it’s also an easy mistake for developers or designers to severely underestimate the complexities of a different game. Game Dev Tycoon isn’t as small as it may seem. The original PC game has over 30K lines of handwritten code, was developed over 1.5 years and has nearly 20K words which appear in the game. The port by Rarebyte (from HTML5/JS to Unity/C#) took over 3,000 hours over nearly a year to develop. The budget isn’t just development either, it includes marketing and other expenses.
The bottom line is that if you run a game development studio as a business where you pay everyone on the team a fair wage and where your own time isn’t worthless either, then game development is really really expensive and risky. That’s especially true if you then factor in the real amount of cash you need to earn to even get that budget together in the first place but that’s a topic we will explore in a proper post-mortem.
Why not make a new game instead?
The other sentiment that came up was why we even spend effort to port an old game instead of making a new one.
Well, to those who haven’t heard it before, let me introduce Game #2: Tavern Keeper š
We are investing heavily into a fantasy tavern simulation game for the PC, you can find out more on our website: https://tavernkeeper.com
The main reason it took us so long to get Game Dev Tycoon for Mobile off the ground was because we didn’t have the human resources to develop both a new game and a port and strategically and creatively a new game seemed more important. We still wanted to do a port simply because so many people asked for it but finding a development partner you can trust takes time, hence the delay in Game Dev Tycoon appearing on mobile.
Are you only marketing to people who own Game Dev Tycoon?
In the first report it seemed like we only used our current fans and reach to market the new release. I didn’t mention it before but we contacted nearly 300 journalists and several influencers during the lead-up of the launch and most of the review coverage is a direct result from that. We also set a review embargo for release day to try to get as many clicks on the App Store page as possible on day one. I think this would have worked fine if not for the link not working. As I also said in the previous report, we would consider a soft launch next time we launch something on the App Store.
To wrap this up, thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion, be it on the forum, on social media and via email! Besides the points I mentioned above, there were many suggestions that made us think and we appreciate all of your input and time. Also thanks to everyone who gave our game a review and who considered other options. This is all really helpful, so thank you! š
Outlook
To close off this report, I wanted to give you some insight into live data that we are seeing on Unity analytics today (this data is a bit more up-to-date than our other sources). Unity analytics show that 1.7K units were installed in the last 14 hours, which suggests that day 4 will be our strongest day yet. In addition, App Annie shows us that we are featured in 15 countries on both the iPhone and iPad home page today (yay!) so we can expect an upwards trend. We will report on the results of the next days early next week.
To be notified of further reports, consider signing up to our newsletter (you will be in good company) and perhaps take the time to white-list āsystem@greenheartgames.comā:
– Patrick
Greenheart Games š
You can comment on this post here.
Continue following our story in part 3.
We decided before the release that we would try to share sales data with the public after checking that this is allowed with our contact at Apple. This is in part so that other developers have more data to make decisions on, and also gives us a chance to talk more about the release, instead of only re-sharing positive coverage.
Here’s the data from our release day (one day delayed because of how the data is collected).
(For Android players: Release on Android is scheduled for January!)
(Release time 28th Nov, 6AM PST.) Data after 24 hours
Piracy
We did not repeat our piracy experiment because I don’t think we are legally allowed to publish an iOS game outside of the App Store, even if it were a joke version. Looking at our data however, and seeing that the actual users are in fact lower than the purchases, suggests that there is a piracy rate of 0%, which would be incredible.
Reception
4.8 stars
iOS Release – Day 1 Analysis: A Rough Start4.8
Players had a great time playing the game. On release day we got 86 ratings with a total rating of 4.8 stars, or as Game Dev Tycoon would say 10, 10, 10, 9 (thanks, All Games š). Seriously though, the only visible low rating was due to an issue where the game can crash on iPhone X ā fair enough and sorry, we are investigating (if you have that issue, please try to logout of Game Center and then back in again or get in touch with us via email).
The press also gave us great reviews, here is the 5-star review from Toucharcade:
Itās the perfect sort of game for mobile devices and thereās so much to do here […] all players owe it to themselves to check out this great port.
We couldnāt have hoped for a better reception. Thanks players and press! You are amazing š
Sale Numbers
1,463 copies in 24 hours is pretty good for a first game on a platform but if you take into account our audience and if we compare this data to other platforms and to the amount of copies we have to sell to break even on the mobile version, it becomes more sobering.
Even on the Windows 8 Store, back in 2011 when we had an audience reach of zero and very few people had Windows 8 (and even fewer wanted to have anything to do with the Store app on it), we sold around 450 copies on day one. Given the massive reach of iOS, the much lower price ($4.99) and given that we (tried) to reach our audience we certainly hoped for a better launch day.
To give another comparison, when the game launched on Steam we sold substantially more on day one.
Visibility
The reason Steam was such a strong release for us was primarily because Steam had us featured on the front page. After the piracy story went viral in early 2012 and we had all the attention of the world (it felt like it anyway) we didnāt actually do the smart business thing and rush the game on Steam but instead disappeared for over three months to polish the game based on feedback weād received from our players. Quality-wise this was an important decision. Our initial release has a Metacritic rating of 68%, but after the changes we made for the Steam release, we got a 95% user approval rating from Steam players. If Steam hadnāt featured us at launch though, I donāt think we would have reached the critical mass that makes word-of-mouth effectiveā¦ bringing me to the next point: marketing.
Marketing (or how we failed to reach most of our audience)
We suspected that Apple would not feature us on day one, so we set our goal to try to rally our audience behind the release on launch day to get the first important positive boost. Part of the reason we were confident to invest into a good Game Dev Tycoon port (Rarebyte, our development partner, spent over a year creating the port), was that we have a larger audience than the usual indie game studio.
Whatās more is that the vast majority of these recipients bought Game Dev Tycoon in the past and are simulation game fans. We treat our newsletter with a lot of respect and only use it when we have big news, sometimes going nearly 600 days without sending something as we really don’t want to inconvenience people. This has worked really well for us in the past as the few times we do actually send a newsletter, we reach a open rate of nearly 40% (industry standard: 20.82%).
Our thinking thus was simple: Make a good port that also offers something new and write a straightforward and nicely formatted email bringing people directly to the iOS store.
We sent the newsletter out in time for the US mainland to see. Sadly though, the result over the next 24 hours was underwhelming: an open rate of 13% and a click rate (on the image or link to the App Store) of 2.41% which is both well below the industry standard. This means that on launch day from our 145K-strong newsletter readership, only 3,509 people clicked on the link. Iām not sure what the cause of this low rating was but people live busy lives and we are not entitled to their time! We will simply try to reach our audience again in the next few days.
Unfortunately, for many of those people who did click the link, the link didnāt seem to work and they couldn’t find the game in the App Store.
App Store patience
Apple says that it can take up to 24 hours for the Store to be updated and show new releases. They are not kidding. We sent our newsletter out six hours after the game release (after we had tested the game link extensively among the team and our friends) but even 18 hours after release people were still saying that the link resolved to nothing. Game Dev Tycoon was also not showing up in search results and we were simply not visible in the Store for the clear majority of the day. This was rather stressful and unexpected. We certainly would consider a soft launch next time we release something on the App Store.
Social media
To try to increase our initial reach we ran a thunderclap campaign (thanks for everyone who signed up) and we were happy with the result but should probably have pushed this more and earlier.
Our announcements (Twitter, Facebook) did reasonably well too but the sad fact of the matter is that the followers you have on social media are largely unreachable unless you spend heavily on advertising.
Reluctantly, spending a bit on advertising is what we tried next, just to give us a first boost and reach our existing followers but both Facebook and Twitter refused to take our money. Facebook apparently doesnāt allow boosting of posts that link to the App Store:
Twitter only allowed me to boost the post in Austria
and then, when I found a specific App Store promotion option, simply refused to accept the link as valid (just as many other users had reported, the link didnāt work for them):
Regardless, we couldnāt afford to invest much in social media boosts anyway. The game is only $4.99 and has no further monetization (no ads, no in-app purchases) and given that Apple still takes a cut, I suspect there is not much point in paying $2+ to get someone to install the game. (We are running a trial on Facebook though, so weāll see what those results will be next week).
Charts
During the end of the first day, we did show up in Top Paid gamesā charts across the world which, given the sales numbers, was surprising. In the US we made spot 42 under Top Paid and in many āStrategyā lists we were in the Top 20.
If you are wondering what Rank 42 in Top Paid relates to in Top Grossing category, the answer is apparently Rank 1,560+ which, together with our earnings from our first day, just highlights how steep the Top charts on the App Store fall. I suspect for premium games, if you are not in the Top 30, you are not very profitable (though this is all based on App Annie rather than data from Apple so take it with a grain of salt).
Outlook and Conclusion
Release day is always stressful and exciting at the same time. On one hand you are faced with unexpected technical issues and simply a lot of unknowns, all of which is emotionally draining. On the other hand, you get to see first reactions and wonderful people share their experiences and enjoy the launch with you. As developers, we spend years behind the screen working quietly on our games with almost no input from anyone so itās really fantastic to then see so much joy from players.
On the business side, we will have to wait and see. The mobile game cost us around 190K USD because, well, the game is much larger than you might think and we really wanted to make a good port. Naturally, we need to sell a lot more copies before this becomes profitable but we are not entitled to profitability, nor success. Itās only the first day and hopefully now that the link works and our game is visible, things will pick up a bit. Meanwhile we are addressing all known issues and hope for a potential feature from Apple (which we are also not entitled to, of course). Our biggest chance to success is, quite simply, you. If you think you could like our game, please check it out:
And if you enjoy the game, leave a positive rating or consider helping in other simple ways š.
PS: To read future analysis and a planned post-mortem, consider signing up to our newsletter:
Game Dev Tycoon is available on iPhone and iPad RIGHT NOW. Go and get it!
Launch trailer
New Features
The mobile port of Game Dev Tycoon was rewritten for mobile from scratch by our development partners Rarebyte. Work started more than a year ago and all in all it took more than three thousand hours to bring Game Dev Tycoon to mobile. This isn’t just a straight port. A lot of love and care went into this and once we saw the quality of the port we took some time out from our second game to develop new content for the mobile release.
Updated Storyline
Gaming history doesn’t stand still and so we’ve updated the game’s story line to match. Who knew Ninvento would deliver another innovative console to the market?
More Topics
We added a bunch of new topics to the game, from Farming and Mad Science to Dystopian and Abstract, to name a few. Now you have even more freedom to make the games you want to make. As part of the extensive user interface redesign, we’ve also given all topics shiny new icons.
New Pirate Mode
The mobile release introduces a new (and optional) super challenging pirate mode. Can you survive as a game developer when faced with game piracy? Will you take investor money to stay afloat? Can you keep up with the DRM curve to protect your income or will you go bankrupt like the majority of startups?
Inspired by true events, this game-mode provides a tough challenge to seasoned game dev tycoons.
Streaming support
Game Dev Tycoon for iPhone and iPad has built-in support for video recording and streaming so if you are a influencer and entertainer, go ahead and broadcast your path to your success (or failure)!
What are you waiting for?
FAQ
Price?
Game Dev Tycoon on iOS costs $4.99 (USD) or your local App Store equivalent which, depending on your currency and taxation system, varies (we don’t have control over region-specific pricing). That’s about half of what it costs on PC. The game has no ads, no in-app purchases and (ahem), no loot boxes.
Android release
The Android release is scheduled for January 2018. If you don’t want to miss it, please subscribe to our newsletter:
PC Update
Originally, we planned to update the Steam/Desktop version a few weeks after the Android release in January but since receiving so much interest from PC players, we plan to put a beta version on Steam once the iOS release has calmed down a little. This will also give modders a chance to make use of our new topic icon features, though adjusting mods is entirely optional as existing mods should continue to work without issues.
If you want to be notified when the PC update goes out, just sign up to our newsletter:
You like the game and want to help spread the word? That’s so nice of you!
Head over here and thank you so much! š¤š¼
To discuss our announcement, please head to our forum.
Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, and iPad are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
The mobile release of Game Dev Tycoon contains no in-app purchases and no ads. We did, however, take the opportunity to add a few new things to the game for this release.
You can look forward to:
– an updated story line (something about bitter tasting cartridges).
– new topics to enable even more game types.
– a new super-difficult game mode, inspired by true events.
– built-in video recording and streaming support because Game Dev Tycoon provedtobepopularwithstreamersaroundtheworld.
– a re-designed user interface, tuned to mobile devices.
PC players won’t miss out on these, as new content such as topics (including these gorgeous icons), the new game mode, and updated story line will be delivered as a free update to our current Game Dev Tycoon players soon after the mobile release.
Anticipated Questions
Why did it take you so long?
We knew a good port would probably take more than a year to do right. We also knew that we lacked the experience with mobile game development to do an efficient job and since we wanted to start our second game too, we had to look for a development partner. Someone with the right experience, someone who gets what makes Game Dev Tycoon fun and, most importantly, someone we can trust to deliver a quality port.
Who developed the port?
We partnered up with Rarebyte, a premium developer with a long history of mobile development experience based in Austria. They have been great!
In what languages will you release Game Dev Tycoon?
The game will be available in 17 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Korean.
In what countries will the game be available?
We aim for a global launch but due to release complexities introduced by China it is unlikely that we will be including China at launch.
Are you looking for testers?
Yes, we’d like to test the game with a small number of players. If you are interested in testing the game, please voice your interest here.
I'm a journalist/influencer, can I get a copy to review?
After two years of working onĀ our next game in secret we are finally ready to tell you what Game #2Ā will be.Ā Find out more at our freshly baked website at www.tavernkeeper.com
First things first: we are not ready to announce more details about Game #2 but in case you haven’t seen our non-revealing teaser page, you can find it hereĀ (make sure you sign up to our newsletter while you are at it!).
That out of the way, I’m happy to report that since we changed the project over to Unity some 10 months agoĀ we have made a ton of progress. It was a bold step and a difficult decision to scratch all our previous prototypes and restart from zero but switching the engine and rebooting the project was absolutely the right call. The game will be much better for it.
The entire team is focused on this reboot and we are getting closer to an internal alpha version of the first level (we currently plan for three large progression steps, similar to how GDT has offices). Most of the core systems like AI, game-mechanics, UX, prop/animation systems are in place for the alpha and our newest team members, Seth and Mike, have employed their art wizardry and art necromancy skills to raise the game from ugly prototype to something that looks very much like an ambitious indie game in the making.
On a personal note, I will remember 2015 as the year I did not sleep. It was also one of the most joyous, emotional and challenging years of my life. Around this time last year my wife and I found out that we are expecting our first children… Surprise: twins!! This year in May we welcomed our twin boys into the world and life has not been the same since. Needless to say, I took some time off in the middle of the year but I had no idea just how challenging it would be to run a business and work from home while having twin-newborns in the house. Looking back, the only reason I was able to get anything done at all was because of the generous help from family and friends. Anyway, it has certainly become easier since then and thankfully, when it comes to Greenheart Games, there is a whole team of people involved.
Looking forward to 2016, I’m very excited about the road ahead and I’m looking forward to being able to start talking more about Game #2 (probably once we are closer to a beta). I’m also aware that our complete focus on this reboot (combined with my temporary break) has meant that we retreated from the Game Dev Tycoon community a bit too much and that’s something I’d like to change.
The last few days I’ve added some better error reporting to GDT, fixed a long-standing issue that would affect new users and Daniel updated the translations again (we now have a Korean beta). I’ve also started working on some small UX improvements and we will discuss other options for GDT in the new year. We feel very fortunate to have so many players still enjoying or just starting to enjoy Game Dev Tycoon and, while we still need to focus on Game #2, we want to do something for the GDT community as well.
Happy holidays and wishing everyone a fantastic 2016.
Last month, we hosted our first charity sale under the label “Gamers, Assemble!”
I’m happy to report that thanks to the generous gamers who participated, we donated 3,500 AUD to the Caritas, Middle East Crisis Appeal.
Here is our donation receipt:
As you can see on the sales page, 143 people contributed 1606.14 USD in the sale.
As a special thanks to people who participated and as a counterpoint to some of the nastier messages we have received about this, we ended up donating much more than what our initially stated rules would have prescribed.
Thanks again to everyone who helped! This will hopefully not be the last time we host a charity sale.
We have been very quiet. Last year was an intense year for us. We hired a larger team and we started a bunch of really interesting projects. Things became hectic quickly. There’s probably a good reason we only allow one project at a time in Game Dev Tycoon :D.
Anyway, as the year progressed, some projects went well, others not so much and not everything has gone to plan. Halfway through the year a new idea for a game came up that quickly became one of the favorites among the team. We realized that this new idea required a much bigger focus and shelved some of the projects that weren’t progressing as much as we’d hoped. This also gave us the opportunity to take the best elements from these shelved projects and integrate them into this new idea.
After prototyping this new project in HTML5, we also realized that this game will really work better with a full 3D engine, and, after spending months working with three.js, we decided to restart the game from scratch in Unity. More on that decision here.
Sadly, all this means that it will be a little while longer before we can show something but we are all really excited about the project. Here are some pointers on what we currently focus on:
Game #2
Our main focus is Game #2. Game #2 is a humorous and sophisticated business simulation game in the spirit of classics like Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper and Star Topia. It’s a new exciting concept and we are focusing on a great single player experience, full with interesting game mechanics and interactive story-telling. It’s our first 3D game and has simulation as well as base building elements. We are super excited about this but unfortunately it’s too early to show more (especially since we are switching engine).
Game Dev Tycoon 2
Game Dev Tycoon 2 is a long term goal for us. Last year we spent a considerable amount of time working on concepts for it (including a early gameplay prototype, more than just talk!). We wanted to prove that we have the necessary vision to make a sequel worthwhile. I think we do. We are innovating on the core gameplay, adding more and more features and aim to deliver a much more mature simulation game (while keeping it fun). We feel though that we can learn a lot from focusing on Game #2 first, and then coming back to the game dev genre. We are not leaving Game Dev Tycoon on the wayside though. More on this soon!
