My studio, Frigus, released a game just over six months ago, World War Tycoon, in April. It may seem like a pretty run-of-the-mill military-themed tycoon, but we have curated it focus on the WW1/WW2 time period, as well as gave it something I’ve seen no other tycoon game do before - have a 2-player and single-player option, all within the same game, so stats between the two, like kills and rebirths, carry over.
At the start, it struggled a bit, but in May, it had an insane come-up, reaching an all-time CCU high of 3,000 CCUs, and a daily revenue of R$200k. At one point, we were #1 on the up-and-coming category, and in our monetization benchmark, we were considered a Top 200 game.
The end of May, we started to fall, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, ROBLOX was testing something with .Touched events which ended up breaking them for most players, and as such, players could not buy anything or collect their cash. Second, we had a pretty poor anti-spawn killing system that saw more seasoned players pick on newer players. Third, we converted over from the crappy ROBLOX DataStores to ProfileService in the middle of all this, and getting player’s stats to convert over was not an easy task. By the middle of June, we slipped under 1,000 CCUs, and have not reached that number since.
Since then, we have fixed the data saving and the spawn killing issues immaculately, and have not had any issues. We have also added a lot more vehicles, like new tanks, new planes, etc., and more recently, we made it so that money saves (before it did not, but a rank system would give you starting cash based on your rank, similar to Military Warfare Tycoon), as well as added a much bigger and more unique map, which allowed us to increase the server sizes by 50%. We also have a daily rewards system now!
Playing the game now vs. just a week ago before the update is so much different, and it is such a better game now.
But despite all our hard work and improvements over the last few months, we have not been able to recover even A THIRD of what our peak was. We’ve tried everything, from partnering with up-and-coming studios in other genres to try reaching out to different playerbases, I’ve tried using ROBLOX ads and sponsorships, and I’ve even tried reaching out to content creators on YouTube again (we did so once, and it yielded great results), but content creators are so notoriously flaky, it’s insane.
What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? What do I need to do, to get this game back up to 1,000+ CCUs again?
