My game, World War Tycoon, started off pretty strong. We had an insane month of May, where we had an absurd robux to player ratio, conversion rate, etc.
But since around Memorial Day Weekend, all of that has tanked like crazy, as you can see in the below pictures.
While our player counts have definitely fallen since the height seen in May, they have vastly stabilized, where we see anywhere from 200-700 CCU’s at a time (usually higher in the mornings/early afternoons EST)
I am wondering how to improve these numbers, given that the game had some insane stats for a couple of weeks in May.
One thing that definitely screwed us up in May was this issue, as you can see right around late May is when all our numbers started to tank, due to many users not being able to collect cash or buy buttons due to that issue…
It has since been resolved, but the fact that our numbers haven’t recovered since then suggests that something else is going on.
A continuation off of this, we also had our approval rating tank due to this. We had an approval rating that sat around in the mid 80% range (would have been higher if we implemented the proper anti-spawn killing system we have now earlier), but that .Touched event issue dropped our like ratio by another 5%+… during Memorial Day Weekend, one of the biggest weekends of the year.
Again, it’s in the past now, but the fact that we have not since recovered to number pre-that incident suggests something else is going on.
The fact that your game’s monetization collapses so drastically in such a short period of time can suggest the following things:
The .Touched bug axed your ongoing playerbase and have not returned due to either a lack of marketing to bring back the running spike or not enough monetization in-game upfront to pickup the maximum profit margin again.
or
Your in-game monetization falls behind your “gamepasses”, i.e your developer products don’t attract enough sales so you see when the playerbase spikes the sales on your gamepasses spike, but there is a lack of attention directed to developer products meaning you don’t get a consistent profit rather you get it in spikes of new players.
Either way I suggest initially working on new methods of developer products, and then investing in marketing so you have retention of developer products, in turn increasing your running playerbase and increasing your avg. profit margin; marketing is useless as an expense if you do not have an account that will attract new players or re-engage older players.
You have enough consistent retained player avg. to skip marketing, and instead inwardly market new developer passes, or make in-game currency more useful - by encouraging / making the purchase of developer products more necessary, the retained playerbase will then in turn respond by purchasing more developer products.
Personally, I do not want to add that to my game either. Military Tycoon definitely has a pretty crazy smart monetization system, and it definitely seems to make them a lot, but IMO it is pretty unethical. The game has definitely crossed well into P2W territory since they released it around 2 years ago.
The .Touched bug definitely screwed us beyond belief. I was pissed to no ends when that happened, especially since I spent multiple hours over a couple of days trying to replicate a glitch that was not consistent and was not something I could fix until I realized what the issue was… I think the dislikes we got from that screwed up our discoverability. We are just under 80% approval, when it seems like the discoverability on ROBLOX seems to favor games in the 80+% range and higher.
ROBLOX really did us dirty there. Prior to that issue, we had insane monetization, and our CCUs were anywhere from 1,000-3,000 players. It was the most amount of CCUs I’ve had on a game since 2015 (where I had about 6,000 CCUs on this game)!!!
The developer products seem to attract a fair amount of sales, as the majority of the last 10 pages worth of sales for the game has been people buying cash developer products (and other developer products) in the game, as seen here. Maybe my developer products are too cheap?
We are planning a complete overhaul & redesign of the bases/tycoons, and will be resetting players’ base saves. This will likely encourage a lot of them to spend robux on cash to rebuild them.
You’d want to focus on popularity of the developer product(s), and then increase them respective so it either switches to a more expensive devProduct, or they continue paying more for the higher price. As long as you have a need for the currency, people will keep paying it.
Consider adding bundles, or sales/discounts - profit can be amassed in sales volume instead of indiv. sale $. By calculating your profit margin, you can compare your original margins to your changed margins - experiment with these for a day or so, and whichever change receives the highest margin percentile, and go with it.
We are planning a complete overhaul & redesign of the bases/tycoons, and will be resetting players’ base saves. This will likely encourage a lot of them to spend robux on cash to rebuild them.
I would proceed with caution on this basis, whilst it’s great to increase need for the purchase, you can also decrease your corporate reputation by rehauling data, as your sale’s volume might tank, and in conjunction with your already more tainted discoverability, taking a huge hit to sale’s volume (by decreased player volume through the demotivation of base statistics) is a great way to %0 profit increases.
I’ve never played your game, so I cannot professionally judge how attached a user would be to their “base stats”, but I know data resets can result in the aforementioned.
Well, the entire bases are being reconstructed. New items to buy, new designs, new layout, etc. There’s really no way to preserve them, especially given that players regularly reset their bases when they rebirth.
Thanks! One thing I was thinking of doing for sales, is increase the price of items by 10-20% when the game has a high(er) CCU, and then decrease the prices when it has a lower CCU. Is that a bad idea?
I’d be looking at your records on that one, but either way at a high CCU, increasing your price won’t increase sales, likely decrease them but your PPS would be high(er); depending on your CPS, this might be a great route for capturing the most effective use of >CCU.
However, once again you’d look at your records for the best decision but another option is at a high(er) CCU, decrease your PPS, which you’d do in projecting a higher sales volume. This, once again same effect as increasing your cost of goods.
You’d make that decision based on your a) target platform & b) average consumer spend rate; if you’re targeting a younger audience, with usually a lower consumer spend rate, you should decrease your sale amount to try and get a higher sales volume. But if you have a pretty nice and high average consumer spend rate, you can go ahead and increase the PPS (being the cost of your developer products), as you can forecast the same sales volume, but with a higher PPS.
Just as long as your PPS is higher than your CPS, you’re doing something right.
How much you would be paid for each individual sale you make; this would be calculated as raw revenue.
whereas
CPS → Cost per sale
How much it would cost to achieve that sale - this can be quite complex to calculate but you’d look at how much you would market, any running expenses / working expenses and how they were directed to make the sale.
Since around December, I have been primarily focused on working on a new project, and we are about to do sponsorships for it. During and after those sponsorships, I intend to loop back to focusing on World War Tycoon, as we have about 2-5 pretty big updates coming out for it over the next couple of months.
I see your game has 300 CCUs, what has helped you with that?
Sorry if I came in a bit brushly, I may be a bit too direct sometimes ahah
Things that helped me are this:
I worked on getting all of my engagement stats really really high for months
Then I did a round of youtuber reach outs and Bax made a video on it which kinda spread out to 4 other youtubers naturally somehow, so we got a huuge boost, I’m talking maybe 500 000 views and roblox boosted us to up to 2000 players
We then quickly lost those because the game is still raw, has bugs and terribly monetized xd
Back in May 2023 we got YouTubers through a service called “BloxMidia.” It ballooned our game to its absolute height of 200k R$ a day in sales, and 3,000 CCUs. I have tried reaching out to that service again, but they always leave me on read and never get back to my messages.
