Do you know about how much you’re earning per player currently? The industry term is “ARPU” (average revenue per user), and tbh it’s usually not the reason games fail.
Let me explain, here are the ARPUs for the best games on Roblox in September 2020.
Now these numbers are actually pretty low, nobody is buying a Tesla with 8 robux - the key here is the “Per User” part. This amount becomes massive when applied across millions of daily users. This helpful article on mobile game development goes over this a bit.
In free to play games, most players don’t spend money - and over half of the revenue is brought in by 0.15% of the users - aka 1 out of 600-700 players. And yeah, this holds true for Roblox games. How many users have been through your game? It’s very possible you haven’t even met your first super-dedicated player yet.
Your testers were almost certainly within the loyal users category, and with that they’re much more likely to make the leap to paying users. But when selling your game to the open market, the large percent of users who never come back will drag down your ARPU - this isn’t bad, it’s expected - that’s why I wouldn’t worry too much about your ARPU.
I suggest you instead focus on making your game bring in more players, instead of worrying about monetization. With premium players you already earn around 1 robux for every 10 players - this may not sound like much (and don’t get me wrong you can easily do better), but even this amount gives you 10k robux for every 100k players in your game.
So, how do you make your game fun? Well, that’s a more difficult question - but I advise figuring out what motivates your players (read here for my write-up on that). Once you know why people like your game, you’ll be able to use analytics + playtesting to track how successfully people are getting to access the fun, as well as showing you potential stumbling blocks for new players (in-person playtesting is especially helpful with that).
I just played your game - we met there lol so I guess this isn’t a big secret. Here are some specific things that I think you could do to make your core game more compelling, and bring in more players:
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Start your game with fun, not a tutorial. You know how so many movies start off with an exciting sequence? That’s to get the audience invested. Don’t start off your game with following lines and reading a bunch of textboxes - as the average kid playing your game is still in elementary school, they might not be the biggest reading fan (though most likely can read). If you have too much text, they might just exit before they get to the fun part. I’d suggest starting them immediately with the core of your game, showing them what makes it fun first, explaining the details later. Like, maybe just give them all the starter items, have them splash stuff, then show them the painting fountain when they’re out, then show them the stores once they have enough money to spend.
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Stupid-proof the onboarding I skipped the backpack part of the tutorial and was fairly confused as to why it wouldn’t refill my paint in the fountain. Now I’m sure you’re thinking “gah that’s why I have the tutorial stupid” - and you’re right, but also I didn’t do it anyway and if I was a kid I probably would have quit. Either make the tutorial very restrictive (like teleport me between things), but this is boring so I’m not sure I recommend it, or you include a bit of extra info about refilling paint, such as “Go get a backpack!” instead of “You’re out of paint”.
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Less is more: I agree with @ijvyce, there is a lot of visual stimuli, in both the UI and the very colorful map. Though I must confess I’m ADD to their ADHD, so maybe we’re just bad with this stuff lol. But I do think it can be a bit more visually streamlined.
For instance with the UI, here is what’s on the screen
Here is what I actually needed at this stage in the game
everything else is just clutter that can be overwhelming to a new player. As to the map, maybe save the brighter colors for interest points - like the shops, the people - basically anything you can interact with.
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Tutie can tag along with me as just UI. Tutie is a fun character, maybe just have her pop up in the UI once I complete something as opposed to making me walk back. As this isn’t exactly an immersion focused game, having me standing in front of her avatar doesn’t improve the game too much - it just means I have to walk back to her before I can get to the next section of the tutorial. It also leads to a ton of people cluttering the area.
But there’s no need for me to be all negative - it’s always tempting in these posts, but there are many things you did well.
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It’s a very well made game - you’ve done well making every mechanic filled to the brim with user feedback, from sound FX, to little UI adjustments when your mouse hovers over it - all that good stuff.
- As I mentioned earlier, Tutie actually had personality - too often NPCs in these games are so bland, but they were a nice surprise. Would love to see more NPCs like them throughout the map.
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I like the Red-Yellow-Blue trees, I know this isn’t too insightful but I’ve never seen that styling used for a tree and I actually really like it, almost irrationally so.
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Game loaded quickly - my internet sucks and I swear every other time I enter a game it’s so filled with meshes and UI that it takes 2-3 mins for everything to load. By limiting the starting map to a small area + reusing a ton of meshes it seems you’ve made a game that loads quite quicky, even for less speedy internet people like me.
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I like the design of the base NPC you fight - the goo + eye look is suprisingly effective, immediately conveying “these are the things you fight” to the player, while not being a major eyesore. And maybe you do this later on, but I would love to see a bit of color variation in them if possible - not necessarily a full color change, but maybe change the eye color, make some of em glow, make some of the projectiles on fire, etc - something to show when one of them is more powerful than the base model.
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I love the rainbow explosion effect that happens when you step in the paint pool yeah there’s nothing else to say really, it just rocks. Wish I could see it more often.
Anyways, you’re obviously a skilled enough developer to make this game fun, I’m guessing you probably already knew half the stuff I said. But hopefully the other half helped, and I hope you focus on improving the onboarding experience so more can play this game.
Good luck!
