Low Retention and No Monetization led my group to lose 20k on ads

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
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#1

Around 2 months ago, I put out a game called Kaboom Kompetition, the game was well received by many small streamers who we found to play, along with some friends who all said there wasn’t much they wanted to see improved, some even came back multiple times after we introduced them too it for the first time, but this isn’t the issue.

Around 4 weeks ago, we put out a new content update for the game which pushed the monetization a bit more, and added more gamepasses and products. Around 2 weeks later, (around a week ago as I’m writing this), we decided we were going to advertise with a budget of 20k robux (70 ad credits), targeting PC and Console players over the age of 9.

We did not want to target mobile and tablet since performance wasn’t the best for those platforms, and previous experiments showed that they did not play for longer than a few minutes at best (and it usually would waste all of the credits almost immediately)

The ad campaign was set up to run 6 days (7/5/24 - 7/11/24), 10 credits per day, with 0.02 max bid. So we started the ad.

So what was the outcome? Well, it’s not pretty.

Retention was quite low, but this was sorta expected since we were advertising to a lot more people, which correlates to less people who might want to return (and increases the amount of people who leave immediately), but it was still much lower than we expected

Retention

D7 not much better

Worse Retention

The unfortunate thing is that the average session time is on par with average, but people who play for a while still don’t seem to want to come back

Average Session Time
Average Session Time1784×551 65.1 KB

And monetization…yea we screwed up
We basically made nothing back from the advertising, losing my group 20k in the process.
According to the summary, we had a net loss of -17058 total robux
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One of the recent steps we’ve made in in-dev was a billboard to display gamepasses, but other than that, we honestly don’t know why the monetization reached so few people

Which is why I’m making this post, I’d like to see some feedback on what we can do to improve the monetization and retention for the game, as without players and payers, we can’t continue to develop the game.

#2

Personally I felt it focused too much on pvp

#3

The purpose of the game is NOT to fight other players, rather destroy the map to earn points and win. Was that not communicated properly?

#4

Tutorial was slightly confusing, especially on the Timebomb part.

You may want to look through the Documentation for Retention for some brief ways to improve them. Additionally, you can try adding daily rewards for players, with reward multipliers through gamepasses.

Maybe adding the objective of both destroying Players and buildings could work as the main objectives of the game. It’s rather “static gameplay” to just solely destroying buildings, and encourages players to stay or come back frequently to compete with other Players

#5

In the next update, we definitely plan to rebalance the tutorial, since it does seem to be confusing for new players. We also plan to add more “come back to get [thing]” in the next update.

#6

Morning!
Okay so I see two problems:

  • Monetisation: so when playing I realised the shop wasn’t really eye catching, I would personally remake it. Something more like how the one in Murder Mystery 2 works, you see the category you’re selecting and have buttons to access each one on the top, I would also add a home page, where you can put special offers and gamepass, and maybe some limited time items, I would also add a starter pack, making players spend money for the first time is pretty hard, so adding an incredibly cheap, good deal, is a great way to break the ice.

  • Advertising: when sponsoring, make sure to use your funds slowly, during 20-30 days, so the Roblox algorithm can get enough data, and then push your game by itself.

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#7

We realized the second one quite quickly, but the first one seems like it would definitely help a lot, since many people don’t notice the buttons and only use the shop from the shopkeepers in the lobby. Thanks for the feedback!

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