I’m LowPolys, and I own the studio that created Construction Simulator. We’ve been pretty successful gaining 4M visits, and hitting the front page for ~2 days. We are currently being featured on the Rthro tab, which has really helped us maintain players and revenue for the past couple of weeks. We have also had some well known YouTubers play our game, including RussoPlays, Seniac, and GamingWithJen in the English sector.
We’ve encountered quite a few bugs during our development, and it’s been a pretty rocky road. Our motivation dipped a few weeks ago and we sort of abandoned the game. However, we recently have felt refreshed, and want to continue polishing Construction Simulator before pursuing other projects.
We are planning an update that adds new features, new content, and rebalancing. What I’m most excited about is gamepad support so we can enable console. What we’re hoping is this new content, and features meant to improve retention such as a daily reward wheel will help us keep players engaged. Looking at our monthly statistics, our day 7 retention was insanely low, with the last reported month with a good amount of data to analyze being May, where it was 2.68%. Our week 1 retention was also about 10% lower than the top 250 games by gameplay time (we were 300th in May).
Our revenue, while it’s nothing to scoff at in total, has never gone above 1 robux per visit looking at monthly before fees, which is if I’m correct is very low.
I’d love if you guys could give me some tips on how to boost our game stats, and also answer these extra questions:
Is localization worth it right now? What languages? We currently have Russian support but no other languages.
For advertising, I’m looking to spend about 100K once our update is ready. Is this worth it when we are already at a consistent, concurrent 300-500 players? If so, how should I spend it?
When I joined the game, I had the option to view the tutorial or skip it. I think 90% of players would probably skip it, so I did the same. When I joined it wasn’t obvious to me at all that I had to click my blueprint to build it. There wasn’t even an icon when my mouse was hovering over the blueprint. Although I stayed on long enough to figure it out, I bet the average player would probably have left by now. I honestly think if you just made a simple change to make it more clear to the player on how to build, you would already have more players. Also, one thing I noticed was some kind of notification in the bottom right-hand corner. It was just like the friend request notification. I think it said something about extra chances for something. What was that about?
I’ll probably rework the new player experience so that the tutorial is still there, but it’s a bit more obvious what to do without reading it. I might also start them off with the first blueprint instead of buying them. An icon while hovering probably isn’t a bad idea either.
The notification system is random gamepass prompts every interval.
Yea, now that you mention it, the player having the first blueprint would also help them out a lot. I would also replace that notification idea with a bigger, more obvious pop-up. I think you could make a lot more sales with that. I thought it was a friend request and by the time I looked to see what it said, it was just disappearing.
I joined your game and I almost immediately left. I was confused about what the game is, where to start, and what to do.
I spawned in my plot of land with some text above it, don’t know what that means. I didn’t get a tutorial, or, if I actually did, I didn’t know the tutorial was even an option. I think a little bit of improvement of the new player experience would be absolutely huge for your retention. It looks like your game is fairly well made and has a lot of fun gameplay and content, but new players will find it hard to get into it.
If you do decide to improve the tutorial feature, making it just a wall of text like a lot of other tutorials could actually be worse for new player retention than not having one at all. Make it interactive.
Good monetization comes from good retention, so to get better monetization I would start by increasing retention. Best of luck.
Localization is almost certainly worth it. I just got back from RDC and I recall ROBLOX saying during a presentation that a large portion of ROBLOX Youtube videos are not in English.
I would also recommend another tip for the tutorial: As gdunn2 mentioned, most players will skip the tutorial. Luckily, you can be ‘sneaky’ and trick your players into completing a tutorial in a fun way. You can give an optional quest with a really cool reward right at the beginning of the game, and to complete the quest, the player is required to do all the basic features of the game at least once. It’s a good way to get them to learn by doing rather than trying to make them learn by reading a guide.
One final recommendation: Pets seem like they would be a fun goal to work to in the game, but as far as I could find, there is no indication of what pets actually do before you buy them. If it was more obvious what use pets served, more players might be more interested in playing for longer to unlock them.
Do you know which languages are most valuable? We have a huge Russian community from a large YouTuber and our localization, but it didn’t actually increase revenue much in Russia.
I really like this idea, thanks. We’re already working on a quest system so we’ll put this in.
I totally agree. The only reason my game became popular was because of a Portuguese youtuber. Because of her video, my game had like 400 Portuguese players on it. You said your game stay constant around there. Having support for more languages can easily double the amount of players you have. Which will also boost revenue.
Like other people said, it did take me some time to realize what to do. I didn’t know that there was a tutorial, either. Starting off with the first blueprint makes sense.
I’ll warn you when you’re making a tutorial: don’t make it a bunch of text that you have to read through. Nobody likes doing that, and they’ll just skip through it. Instead, give hints, like arrows pointing to buttons you need to click.
I also noticed a lack of progression system. Players love to feel like they’re making progress in a game, especially early on. You can achieve this in the form of a level system.
At least on YouTube, the most popular languages for ROBLOX besides English in order are Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish. These 3 languages together make up over 25% of all ROBLOX YouTube viewership!
However, this doesn’t actually tell us which are the most ‘valuable’ - just the most common. Naturally, players from different locations in the world will be willing to spend different amounts of Robux in your game, and I can’t immediately find any data that points to which languages might actually yield the highest monetization.
Regardless, I’d say that those 3 languages would be the best to translate your game to because of the large share of players that speak these languages.
I think we’re just going to remove the tutorial all together, it seems to be bugged anyways as some people are saying they didn’t see it upon joining (it’s a pretty large popup). It will be replaced with the new quest system having a quest where you need to build a blueprint, sell it, and also buy a new one in the shop. Simple instructions will be provided. This sort of doubles as a progression type system.
@LowPolys Have you ever looked at the monthly report for your game. If i’m not mistaken, it will show you the top countries for your game.
For example this is mine:
I have, that’s where I find my retention stats. Using June (latest month I have stats for) these are my top countries. Russia is accounted for already. Perhaps adding Spanish/Portuguese localization could bring in a lot of new players if Brazil is currently the only country that has one of those languages as it’s official language?
