Sponsoring Efficiency on large budget (+150K Robux)

Hello, our group, Evolution Artworks, have done a few months ago a sponsor ad with a very high budget for the update of our game, called Dragon Ball Evolution ALPHA. Even though the budget was extremely high, it was mostly testing. We’ve spent in total 180K robux on 3 days, and here are the results that we got.

The ad was a decent success. We’ve done 2 different updates with 2 different methods. We’ve done 1 update called “Potara Update” which didn’t have any ads, that got a player peak of 970 players. Then, we’ve done an other update called “Mystic Update” with the sponsor ad of 180K robux, and we got a player peak of 1.4K players.

We’re expecting a game remaster called “BETA” in about 2 months that could heavily improve player count / popularity / revenue. We’ve been working on it for about 7 months with live service updates aside from it. But we’ve stopped the ALPHA’s version live service since a month, and player base is extremely low. But we are aware from community votes that most player left waiting for the game’s remaster :

So about this ad, we’re wondering multiple things :

  • Was the ad worthy?
  • Could we have done better?
  • How could we improve our sponsor / ad strategies to make a successful update to make a potentially good game remaster to make a game go from a 250 max player base to a 1k-3k player base?

We thought about many marketing strategies to improve our popularity and player base. We already thought about :
With ads :

  • Extending the days of the ad (up to 3 weeks)
  • Having a greater budget (up to 600k robux are currently ready at the moment of writting this topic)
  • Using multiple ads and sponsors (4 ads for 70k robux each on a week, 200k robux on sponsors on 1 week)

With other methods :

  • Getting the help of other potentially popular anime Youtubers
  • Getting the help of other discord servers?
  • Youtube Trailers?
  • Short period paid access before release?

If any of those strategies could work, even combined, we’d be interested to know which. And also, if there are any other solutions, we’d be pleased to know more about it.
Thanks.

3 Likes

You spent 180k on sponsorships and only got a 1.4k player peak??? I ran a sponsorship for 10k and got a peak of 860 players. To compare that to price and players yours was a huge flop unless i just got lucky.

3 Likes

In advertisement, it seems that it is all about luck. And it also depends on the game’s quality. For mine, at the time, the game quality and reason of the update was fairly low. But I don’t know how important that fact is.
What was the reason of the sponsorship and how good was the game at the time?

I would not focus on the ad. Best to work on retention with players and improving the gameplay so that players want to keep playing and staying long.

Could you tell us what kind of game was it?

We’re already hardly working on retention by making the best experience possible compared to our potential competitors (Dragon Blox, Dragon Ball Rage, etc…), and we’re looking to make the launch as big as possible to make sure that the game’s potential is fully exploited at release.

Wow! If I may, where did you sponsor? Like on mobile, computer, or tablet? And what was your game?

It was on tablet because most PC or mobile players dont look at sponsorships. My game was a small obby game where the obby changes everytime you play.

2 Likes

The budget is good enough. I would spread it out over about a week to get a bit more clicks. Also, think about the demographic and when they would be on the website to see it.

We heavily thought about the demography of the world to know what is the best time to strike for an update, which is between 6pm and 10pm GMT+2, during Friday. Most of US inhabitants will be awake, and also most of children will be back from school in a few hours after the update.
I thought about increasing the budget up to 500K for the World wide launch of the update to spread it over 4 ads of 50k robux each on 5 days, day 0 to 2 180k robux for sponsor ads, and 210k over 2 weeks, a week before the Day 0 of the update.
(+100k in ads for testing periods like Open BETA where the game is open for just 3 days after a week of work.)

Would those insane amounts of robux, be enough?? (for a maximized release, from 2K players to maybe up to 10k??)

2 Likes

your CTR of .01% is okay but could have been much better if you got a better game icon. It would have brang you a whole lot more visits and certainely means more income.

I’d suggest you to really focus on getting a better game icon, it’s the main thing that really matters in sponsorship

The icon isn’t similar to what has been used during the update. It has been this :

I’m the GFX artist. I’m working hard on making the icons impactful compared to our competitors. At this time, it was a pretty nice one. It’s indicating that it’s a temporary event from the “3 days left” inciting the players to go early to get the form, which is nice.

Though, I’m not experienced in ads banners at all. I don’t know how to do that. Do you know who or what can I check to practice that?
Thanks.

I dont think you need that much robux but your plan sounds good. Make sure you have appealing ads.

2 Likes