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This is part 2 of our Game Dev Tycoon iOS release analysis.

• Part 1: A Rough Start
• Part 2: Steady Improvements
• Part 3: Game of the Day!
• Part 4: Good News

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

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 haven’t had a chance to play it yet.

This is in stark contrast to our experience on PC – 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 😁

(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.

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). – 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

Pocketgamer (Ric Cowley)

Chart Rankings

According to App Annie day 2 saw us drop out from the Top 100 charts but thankfully we improved substantially on day 3 reaching the Top 28 in the US.

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 it’ll be interesting to see how closely our proceeds will match our chart position.

Day 1 Report Reactions

I’d 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! 💚

Newsletter

We sent out another newsletter last night and I’m 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 ‘Promotions’ tab which, I suspect, very few people actually read and has been dubbed ‘The Death of Email Marketing’. 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 😉

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! 💚

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 ‘system@greenheartgames.com’:

– Patrick
Greenheart Games 💚

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Continue following our story in part 3.