Hi, I recently started an ad run on my game, 2.5k robux, to test out my game for bugs and revenue. Overall, I’m pretty happy about the number of bugs I was able to fix. I fixed 95% of them so far. That’s a plus. However, my revenue is very low. In a ratio of the visit to robux spent.
I got a 1:7 ratio.
I get 1 robux / every 7 players. Overall, not happy about this. From my other games, I’ve made a 1:2.5 ratio. I’ve also compared my ratio to other games. On average, games have a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio. I plan to make some updates on my game which will hopefully encourage the players to keep playing, and maybe spend some robux. Right now, I only see two choices.
Option 1
Stop progression on the game, and make a new and more “original game”.
Option 2
Try and update the game to the point of players wanting to buy gamepasses. (Not sure how to do that…)
I understand my game is a Simulator, a Stick Simulator nonetheless, however, I did have fun making it. I’m strongly thinking about option 2. However I’m not sure how I can achieve this…
This is a mere “first-impression” of the 2 minutes i spent in the game,
But, due to the extremely high ressemblance to Saber Simulator, you game depends of only 2 questions :
Is it different than Saber?
Is it better than Saber?
if none of these apply, it’s guarantee that no one buys your product due that they made sure they’ll never come back to your game, as it is no better than the existing genre.
It’s a personal opinion, but “Stick” Simulator, compared to “Saber”, Even the game title is seemingly not interesting, i’d consider a new project.
Interesting points. Never really thought of that. I’ll take that into consideration. I’ve also come across another person, who believes the game is “stale/dry” As in, what makes this game different/stand out. A lot of good input in my opinion.
First of all, this game has a really addicting and fun concept but one thing I will say is that it feels quite chaotic to just be there. I recommend expanding (more open) the map and brighten it up more.
For monetization, I played the game and immediately realized why you’re not making as much Robux as you should be. Firstly, you should be selling cash for Robux utilizing developer products. Secondly, on this: http://prntscr.com/pkt6qs include a stick that players can purchase for Robux.
Include a Robux shop building as well, A great way to learn how to make more Robux from your games is going to the top grossing list and taking some inspiration from those games.
Interesting point, I did take advantage of dev products and made a shop for ingame currency. Maybe adding the physical shop might help. I will for sure try that out. https://gyazo.com/3499dbd5ce3ebf88e0b05ede439e128e
One more thing, it’s really confusing how there’s coins you collect from selling, gathering them from the map and there’s also a coin icon where your coins are. Then it says money on the leaderboard and it says money when you go to purchase a new stick.
Also I found a bug, you can purchase a stick more than once making it really easy to waste your money/coins quickly, which is really annoying and will make people leave. You have to realize that most of the people playing these games are kids so the games have to be simple or very guided (which is something this game lacks).
And yeah, I just realized there’s a money shop but it’s disguised. the purchase money area looks like art or something. Hope I helped, I wish I could create games like these but sadly I don’t know how to program which I am in the process of learning how to. Take advantage of your talent and don’t take it for granted.
My game got roughly 3 Robux per every visit when we released. We sponsored 7.5K on the first day and made 35,000 back. It might be a case that your game has no incentive to buy the products. Are they worth it? Are they worth spending money? Even if they are, if your game lacks engagement (you can get a good measure of this by looking at your average visit lengths), players will feel no need to spend money on products even if they are worth the money.
When we released an update to balance the game better, we dropped to about 2.5-2.7 Robux per visit, even though the game was much better for new players and balanced better. A possible consequence of a game being balanced too much in the favor of being able to complete it easily without grinding/spending money is less revenue, so keep that in mind.
And it might also be from the law of diminishing marginal returns
Balancing games will pretty much always be better for long term revenue, there’s no need to worry about that. Overt/exploitive pay-to-win systems only work well for the short run — that’s why Zynga has to pump out new games every week.
More likely it’s because my game has issues with engagement and overall it’s not a fun game or really an enjoyable one, and I will be the first to admit that. After the initial wave of sponsoring and release it got old quick and new players weren’t sticking and that was because of flaws in the game design itself. So it’s nearly impossible to fix at this point. I think our initial success was due to very little competition in the market of our game, and our game was vastly different to the only other game like it.
I see what you mean. I think you are being a bit too self-critical, as almost no game does super well without extensive testing and previous experience. From what I see, the game is better than most of the recycled simulators on roblox.
Just from looking at the gamepass store, I would add some cheaper purchases to lead into your other microtransactions. The biggest mental barrier is the first purchase, and I often find a single cheap-buy will lead to subsequent, and much larger, purchases.
Also, you should just sell more stuff. Instead of just functional upgrades, cosmetic content and other stuff can diversify your monetization scheme.
This all may sound “exploitive” or something, but if your game is poorly monetized it hurts retention, and makes it a worse experience for the players. Undermonetization can be as bad as overmonetization.
I don’t see why you would give up while the game can still make a profit, and I don’t think you should be discouraged by those nasty downvote botters. You already put the hard work in the game and I wish the best for y’all.
The dislike bot does more damage than you think. It doesn’t get on any sort other than popular, and even then, you would have to spend like 2 or 3 minutes scrolling down to find it. That basically means to get our game out there with sponsoring or advertising we really need to go brute force with it and cross some high threshold in Robux bid to be highly profitable. Sponsor bids below 15K only get us about 40 players, and comparing that to our first day of release when we sponsored 7.5K and got 150 players, it’s bad. Cosmetics don’t really have a place in the game except for upgrades, but we don’t want to add cosmetic upgrades because most players aren’t even at the stage where they are upgrading their base because of how screwed balancing was/is. We have many lower-price purchases, a lot of which are actually very helpful. About 2/3 of our revenue comes from developer product purchases. I think the game is well monetized as it is – we make around 2,000 robux every day with a constant player count in single digits. Just really bad balancing because it’s our first game that we actually tried to release and also happened to be the one project where we made the game without thinking too hard about gameplay or balancing.
We’re not abandoning it yet though, mostly because of our community. We’re doing one final update then moving on to our next project. This game has already more than reached our goal for it, which was to get a good amount of Robux to fund a future game.
