Hey everyone, I’m one of the scripters for the game Rage Simulator. Recently we’ve started doing some small test sponsors just to test for things like bugs, revenue and player retention. The game seems to be performing very well apart from some slight bugs that don’t seem to be breaking the game in any way.
The issue is the revenue and player retention, for the first sponsor we decided to start very small with a one-time investment of 2.5K robux on PC, we peaked at about 56 players and got 1900 visits. However, we earned only about 1.1K robux from this sponsor. And the game quickly died out, we were kind of expecting it to die quickly with only 2.5K robux but we were hoping for a bit more revenue. We then fixed some things, and added a starter pack and a robux pet egg, and then we sponsored with 15K robux, 10K on pc, 2.5K on mobile and 2.5K on tablet, this time we peaked at around 150 concurrent players but only made back about 9K robux. The game also lost most of its players once the sponsor ran out, it quickly went down to 20 and is now sitting at about 0 to 10 people playing
These results aren’t very motivating with us and we aren’t entirely sure what’s wrong with the game, we do have one idea which is that maybe the map is a bit too dull and we’ll probably want to revamp it to make it maybe look more cartoony and have it give a better vibe. However, we aren’t sure if this would solve every problem we have and we’re looking for some suggestions.
TL;DR: game not performing as well as expected, need suggestions.
Try improving on one aspect, like combat or exploration. Most of the time I simply found myself running around collecting items to be the most efficient way to get currency which isn’t very engaging.
The achievements are good and the upgrades are good, but they mostly only the combat which doesn’t seem to be that prominent. IMO you should try and make the combat more engaging and rewarding.
Another thing, the people I played with didn’t understand the safe-zone. Maybe try and explain it better.
You could fight low retention by focusing on adding more long term initiatives, but imo on Roblox many games can succeed on just having a fun core loop. Natural Disaster Survival is my go to for this one - there isn’t much of a long term reason to come back, other than you know you’ll have fun. Simply put, if players aren’t coming back, they aren’t having fun to begin with - so let’s figure out why!
A core loop for those reading who might not be familiar with it, is the core high level goals/actions players make repeatedly during a game. It is the closest we can come to mapping the fun of the game. For example here’s the core loop of an upcoming game of mine:
The trick you need to pull to improve your game is to set up analytics to track your players as they move through the loop, that way you can figure out which sections cause them to quit most often. If you can get people to flow smoothly through the loop, you should be alright.
For instance for my core loop above, we could track when they earn money, track when they’re creating something (in this game’s case a spaceship), track when they’re flying the ship, and track when they’ve just battled. Then once you have these variables tracked, you can sort the player into which part of the core loop they’re in. Once you’ve done that you can link metrics like whether they exit at this section, or whether they spend money.
Using these analytics you can figure out where in your game loop people are struggling. Once you know where the struggle is, you know where to focus your updates. At this stage it’s usually best to do some live testing to see exactly why people dislike a certain section of the core loop.
If you need a good free option for game analytics, the GameAnalytics.com one has some good documentation if you can’t get into the early Playfab stuff. Best of luck!
Thanks for the response! We’ll try to make the combat more rewarding as right now it is like you said a bit of a pointless mechanic ingame and we should give it more attention. As for the safezone thing we’ll consider adding a little UI indicating they’re in the safezone when they are.
Thanks! This is very helpful, the process of earning money in our game probably isn’t fun enough for a lot of people, we’ll try to make it more appealing. And thanks for telling me about that GameAnalytics SDK, looks useful!
The game seems too barren to me, the map itself looks nice but collecting tokens only holds up so much entertainment for so long.
If you’re going to try to push for the combat route, 10 player servers is too few for how large the map is.
Personally, adding AI mobs to fight and loot from would improve the experience drastically. If not, something else to bring more life to it; after playing for a few minutes I didn’t really feel like there was much else to really experience.
Thanks, once we add some sort of boss mechanic the combat part of the game should be more fun.
Did you notice the islands you can jump up to where you can unlock more tools to flip and more pets to equip? Just asking because I’m not sure if everyone who joins the game knows that there are islands to unlock, which may also be a reason they leave.
This isn’t an answer to your question, but it’s related to what you posted here.
When your game ran its sponsorship, coincidentally I was doing a study of sponsorship effectiveness. In my sample, Rage Simulator was among the worst performing sponsorships in terms of visits per percentage of ad space. So I would make an educated guess that people really don’t want to click your game icon for some reason. Your game might do better if you make a more enticing icon.
When I heard “Rage Simulator,” I imagined a game where you trash buildings, furniture and other items into a cornucopia of disarray, building up a rage bar to perform even more powerful rage moves, like explosions or what not, and earning points for how much damage you cause.
The first thing I noticed before I even played the game was the thumbnail. Apart from the game title, there was literally no implication of the abstract noun “rage.” It just shows some people walking around with some cube pets. That to me was a bad sign.
Then the gameplay. Simply put, it was not what I had anticipated when I heard “Rage Simulator.” You just flip a chair. And again. And again. Until you need to “sell your rage” to get a “better chair.” I found it extremely unengaging: it was mostly just spamming the left mouse button until I needed to click a button, then repeat.
It has been proven that this style of gameplay can gain players. I imagine that this is an intended cash grab kind of game. (That’s not an insult: many games, in one way or another, are designed to get players to give them money.) However, it is my personal opinion that there were others, like myself, who did not find what they were looking for.
My personal suggestion for a quick solution would be to change the method to obtaining “rage.” Here’s an idea:
Build different maps, such as a shopping mall, airport, etc… Players can throw stuff around, and gain rage for the damage they cause (As a bonus, you can only enter certain maps if you’re a high enough level);
Instead of buying different items of furniture, give players weapons they can use to smash things… perhaps even “high-tier” items like explosives or telekinetic weapons; and
I didn’t play long enough to find out if pets had any real function, but allowing pets to aid you in causing chaos would be a nice touch.
so i played the game and uh i think one of the main reasons ppl dont like it is cuz u cannot damage other players also when u hold it and dont release it on time it wont flip if this was intentional then at least show a message like missed kinda gui 2nd thing maybe put a rage battle like with the damage system kinda like how speed simulator has a race 3rd thing is maybe do a ton of optimization last but not least i would suggest put some cheaper eggs on the ground
edit: increase walkspeed a bit and rework the flip its very short lengthed, maybe change the skybox cuz overall the game is very slow paced, dashes would help and rework the script for token collection its very laggy
