I’m Mithrandir6440. I own the small game development studio Wizardry Games, and I also do custom music and sound effect commissions. Recently Wizardry Games came out with it’s first-ever game Castle Tycoon!
People are enjoying the game from what I can tell. The game has hit 20 concurrent players, 2.5k visits, and 170 favorites. The problem is, no one is buying anything.
I’ve done 2 concurrent advertising sessions, one costing me 5k, the other costing me 3k. Sadly, the game has only seen around 1k robux in revenue. Not counting benevolent friends, less than 300.
I would like feedback on the game’s monetization. I thought adding devproducts to the game seemed the obvious way to monetize a tycoon, but now I’m not as sure. Why do you think players are not buying the gamepasses and devproducts? Are they underpowered? Unhelpful? Is the game just not exciting enough to encourage spending anyways? Or do Tycoons just not make a lot of money.
Hey there I’ve never made a tycoon game/ or any game [Other than the one I’m working on right now] for that matter, but usually when I buy currency in a game it’s because I want to shortcut progress in some way. With bigger tycoons they usually make the prices super high and add a 2x money product to speed things up.
I really like the map you have the little underground section is cool but not having a border personally threw me off.
I’m personally not a fan of tycoons so I wouldn’t spend much on it but I’m sure others will, also the more players you have the more money flow you’ll inevitably get. Hope my feedback was alright keep up the good work.
As the other games do, add gamepasses for certain items, 2X, purchasable money. Just remember to don’t put high prices(Like 2k robux for 2X like other tycoons). Some kind of save and rebirth system may get players to play more. Hope I helped!
I think I agree with the guys above, but , I think your system has the “belts” going extremely fast… so what you could do is slow them to half that speed, and then have a gamepass to make them faster.
Also you could have a gamepass, as the others have said, for 2x or 3x the money made from the droppers. And even a game pass for a special exclusive dropper.
You pretty much want to make the game fun for free to play while offering options to pay ahead for things.
You could offer the option to buy money I guess as well, but then you may need to add a lot more content to keep things going, as if a player can just pay to win and beat the game in 15mins, that’s no fun. lol
There are 3 points you need to consider when monetizing your game:
Give players a real reason to buy your stuff
Go for all price sizes
Think broad and don’t focus on one set of things for monetizing
I will go into more detail for them all.
When you are working on monetization, and when working on your game in general, you always need to look at it from a player’s perspective, “what would I want to have to make this easier to play, or boost my stats, or make me look great?” With your tycoon for example, you have gold, but it’s only use is to help build your castle, and nothing else, and thinking from a player’s perspective, would I want to buy something that I can earn in 5 minutes for that price, you should probably consider this and possibly rework the system, with extensive testing of course.
In the Roblox universe,(I got this from a dev whose name escapes me(Edit: I think I remember now it was @peraldon)) there are big buyers and small buyers, and you want to accommodate for them all. For a start, you want to have like the smallest amount possible, which is something like 2 or 3 robux(not 1 of course). This strategy will make sure that you will be getting some robux and not a big fat 0. I have proof that this works, and I get an average of 1-2 from that alone everyday, and I get only 400 visits a day, so imagine 4000 or 40000. You also want to make sure you have a big robux item, that would still definitely be worth it, but a lot more than a normal purchase, there aren’t a lot, but there are cough “experiencers” cough out there who have hundreds of thousands of robux to spend and will spend it on your game, just wait, it will happen. As a side note, you will definitely want in between stuff…captain obvious I know😆
Going back to player’s perspective, you need to think like “oh, I wish this was this way, or it would be easier if I could get this that way, or I want to earn this a WHOLE lot faster than I am right now”. If you keep this in mind and look for opportunities to make things better with monetization, you can make your players happier, visit count will go up, and you will earn more! Doing this will greatly improve your options for people to buy stuff, and get creative too, (bad example)like who would think that buying a dev product that gives you an extra 5% jump power every time you buy would be useful?? You just never know, some one could buy 5 and be able to get over walls, and completely dominate. Go crazy!
The only other thing I see is that in my opinion someone would be less inclined to buy gold because it won’t save. I played your game pre release when your currency actually saved, and I was like ok yeah I’ll buy a couple things and see what happens. But then it was changed to not saving after leaving, so then I was like eh, why would I buy this if I am just going to lose it when I leave?? Now as of now you don’t have enough content to make saving a good idea right now, and I know a lot of tycoons do that, but it is just my opinion the way I saw it.
I had a tycoon with 34k visits that generated me 11k robux, I think the biggest thing is having a niche genre that people can’t find elsewise, they usually have less things to spend robux on and so spend more on games that fit the genre they like
Maybe add a basic tutorial or just spare a minute to describe how to play the game and what everything is. Would turn less people away and people might value monetization items (like trails) more
Hello, I have fully completed your tycoon. I must say that the building style looks very nice, but the gameplay is rather boring. The progress is rather slow. But that alone shouldn’t be much of a problem. The real problem is that there is nothing to do while you wait to get money.
Remember, people get bored quickly (especially kids) so you need to keep them busy with something if you want them to stay. I suggest making an obby at the middle. Maybe make some challenges for the players to complete like: “Kill 3 players” or “Complete the obby” and then give the rewards such as money or items… Or perhaps you can make the middle a place to dominate. The person who is dominating the middle gets a boost in money. Competition is a good way to keep people invested in your game.
For the monetization part, you should also look at other tycoons. instead of putting all your gamepasses in one shop Gui, put some into pads. For example: a 2x money pass, some exlusive droppers or items…
I once found this article on the forums that talks about why some games are less succesful than others and how to get your game to be more succesful: Why your Roblox game isn't popular ,I recommend you take a read…
I hope my reply helped you out and also sorry if I was a little harsh,
VTB
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Hope my feedback was alright keep up the good work.
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