Sorry if this is the wrong category but I wasn’t sure where I should’ve put this.
I have no clue on how much I should spend. I know about advertising (CTR, the basics, etc). But I really don’t know how much I should spend or how to spend it. I was thinking a budget of $800 would be good for my purposes. I have also been working on building a twitter fanbase on my game. How much do big games that get to the front page spend? (besides getting people from outside sources like social media). Also I know that player retention is a big factor in getting players to stay for a while. One thing I was thinking as well was to spend a big amount on release and slowly taper off over the next month/weeks.
What do you spend? (if you’re willing to share) And how has what you’ve spent affected you?
Thanks for any responses!
Surely you aren’t talking about buying robux in order to run ads.
You have no business running ads until your game is making money. When that happens just put the robux earnings directly into ads. Any other way is going to be significantly more expensive.
Would you suggest that someone who doesn’t currently have a following to spend money on it at all? If you never hyped the game up on social media wouldn’t this be the thing to do? Or should I spend a small amount just to see the feedback and go as needed?
Maybe spend a small amount and tune the game as needed to bring in the most possible revenue?
800 would, at best, get you 140,000 R. To recoup that initial 800 you would need to make back 400,000 R, after taxes. Only after you make back that first 400,000 R$ would your game start making money. Or you may only make 100,000 R$ back and end up out a few hundred bucks.
Investing so much is a gamble, and if it doesn’t pay off there is no way to make it better. If you release your game and it has a small audience then you can run ads to start to grow it. But if you release it and advertise it and it also has a small audience, then you can’t increase its audience further with ads since that’s where your initial audience is from.
Another problem may be that your game just isn’t monetized properly. The best I’ve heard was a properly monetized game makes somewhere between .5 and 2 R$ per visit, so this is what you should keep in mind. If you release a game and spam it with ads and it only gets .1 R$ per visit, you are simply wasting money. Releasing it first without a large ad campaign should help see if your game just isn’t worth advertising, money wise, or atleast tell you what to fix to help make money from it.
To back up with @paul2448 is saying, I have this game here:
It’s currently at 10,977 visits, and has made 10,080 R$. That’s actually pretty good when basing that the game has only been going for the past month. However, it’s a one of a kind game, without much competition at all, and I’m already well-known for making racing games so I had to do no investing with ads.
The issue is, if you dump a ton of money in, and you’re in the hole, you have to constantly be climbing out. If you just put the game out, and try to get it around with word of mouth, you can wait until you start getting money and continue upscaling your clients with advertising. This way you can attempt to just try and break-even. I know it seems hard, that people will randomly just start playing your game, but if it’s a truly great game, and nobody has really done it before, people will play, and people will bring their friends.
Never calculated the ratio of players:robux. My most popular game had one of about .39 Robux (after calculating now) per player but that was because I got lazy at the end of development and was rushing out features and developer products (was just ready to release and it was my fault which i have learned from). I was looking to spend a decent amount of Robux and put whatever revenue back into advertising. This definitely changes the way I look at it.
Thought about it and I guess it really makes sense. If players think it is fun then they will play it. If no one is playing it then no one is having fun on it. If people are playing then spend money to have more people play it.
With all due respect, this is a completely awful way of thinking about advertising if you’re not already a name. Advertisement is, if you do it right, hands down the easiest way to get players, and you will get your money back so long as you yourself don’t mess up when placing ads or making your game.
Go do some tests on it, with friends and other random people. Ask people to join in random discord servers. When you get enough feedback (around 50+ opinions), if it’s mostly positive, you could consider investing $800. When testing, ask questions, i.e. “Would you play this again?”, “Would you spend Robux on it if it was popular?”. If it’s negative however, it’s not worth it. You may get a lot of players with $800 but if they don’t enjoy it there’s no point, they won’t spend on it, they won’t rejoin.
I usually sponsored for 500 - 1.5k
And the most I ever got out of it was 1,000 players ( Not exactly )
And from then the players ( If they enjoyed the game ) Would keep on coming back telling their friends about it etc
It’s still quite a gamble though, the game should have a foundation of support before the initial advertise wave. If you are getting a small playerbase constantly playing, then they must be hooked on your content, and you must be doing something right. Then, as aforementioned above, advertise freely on twitter, discord etc to cultivate that playerbase. Only when you know that the playerbase loves your game can you assume the ad will bring in more. Listen to the watermelon shark dude, he has tons of success and experience in games.
TL;DR Imagine a new starting out game with a very small playerbase as a wooden floor that’s structually damaged. Advertising is polishing it, and it will not change the structure of the floor, and as players start playing on it it will break, and they will leave. The floor should be structally sound before polishing it, so you don’t have it breaking on the players when they come. Basically a bait with a broken hook. No point advertising if it’s going to get you nowhere. (Although, very rarely you’ll have a very new game, fresh out of development hit success. Meaning that game has the structually sound content without needing a playerbase to confirm it.)
That’s not the point of this thread. The question is “is this ad worth $800?” and if the game hasn’t been tested properly then it’s almost certainly not. No one makes fun games without testing and iterating, and no one spends money in games that aren’t fun.
So sure, if you’re confident and you’ve got $800 lying around by all means go for it. But it will not be the most efficient use of your budget.
Please make sure you actually have enough dry firewood to keep the fire burning before you decide to dump a whole lot of gasoline into a small campfire.
What I mean is, spending 800$ on advertising BEFORE asking other players what they actually think about the game is a one-way trip to disappointement.
Do a soft launch first and spend maybe 1-3k robux on your first ad campaign to test the water, see if any bugs arise over the course of the day and see if your players actually like your game and if they are coming back to play it again.
You can always spend more money on advertising later on.
