I’ve been looking into a rather alarming pattern I’ve been seeing throughout 3 of my games recently and wanted to see if anybody else is experiencing similar issues.
To Summarize:
It seems as though after every game release the algorithm will begin to favor audiences which provide high D1 retention and average playtime. This in turn appears to shift your audience to countries such as Russia, Brazil, and “Other”. The issue with the algorithm favoring the statistics listed above is these audiences typically tend to spend significantly less robux then other audiences. While there is nothing wrong with this, the issue arrises when this ends up majorly decreasing all monetization stats such as ARPDAU, ARPPU, and Conversion Rate. This then seems to cause a chain reaction where the algorithm will drop the game due to terrible monetization stats.
Here are some screenshots of various statistics:
ARPDAU
Average Playtime
D1 Retention
I’m interested if others have noticed anything similar. This seems to be an issue which can cause games to die with the owners having no control.
Edit: Hoping I got the correct category this time, this post was removed before.
I’ve had the same issue with 2 simulators in a row now, right from the gate on both of them they have been pushed to Brazil, Russia and the ‘Other’ countries. My most recent game Muscle Race Simulator, has very good all-round stats. But when you check out the revenue statistics, they are cut into a half or even a third because of these ‘Other’ countries. I’ll provide some pictures below
I have tried every way I know to try and get the algorithm to switch up the audience. I’ve ran sponsors to only the US and Canada, I’ve tried thumbnails and icons tailored to US, but nothing has worked. I feel as if this is just something completely out of game owners control, and it ultimately ends up killing games.
I’ve been having the same issue with one of my games which has completely killed all of the revenue.
I have 2 similar games where 1 is a main one, and other 1 is a A/B testing one. There’s little to no changes in these games. First game makes around 1.00 ARPDAU, while the other one makes only 0.05 ARPDAU. That’s a 20x margin.
I checked “country audience” analytics page and was able to detect that 0.05 ARPDAU game has mostly players from underdeveloped countries, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Philipines dominating the charts, while the US audience is only at like 2-5%.
In comparison, 1.00 ARPDAU game has at least 20%+ US audience and way higher percentages for more developed countries like UK , Canada, Australia, and most of the EU countries.
Once again, the difference between these games is little to nothing. At this point it just feels like gambling because you will never know what Countries alogirthm is going to put in to your game.
