Market Experience [Gravibounce]
Gravibounce
You learn something new every day. Even more so when you finish a large project and send it out into the harsh wilderness of the internet.
We learned a lot once Gravibounce launched. A lot more than we expected from our “weekend warrior” in any case.
In the beginning we had very high hopes for the success of Gravibounce. The game was well polished, had a unique game-play and was clearly of good quality. However as time went on, and lack of finding sponsorship got to us, we started to look down upon it. That was our biggest mistake for sure. We knew our game was good and we foolishly lowered our expectations due to the outside worlds treatment. This led to us accepting a deal that wasn’t horrible, but was nowhere near what we could be rolling around in right now. We later ran into a rushed situation that forced us to accept a deal which was also a determining factor in the lack of success we could have seen.
Our first big mistake was to not include ads in our game, MochiAds, CPMStar, anything would have
done. Gravibounce was awarded daily 2nd place and a front page position on Newgrounds.
This of course granted it a large amount of views and some widespread attention on the internet.
In it’s life thus far it’s recieved over 50k views on Newgrounds alone, that’s a nice chunk of
change via in game ads. The game radically spread to flash portals all over the net after that,
earning it thousands upon thousands of more views. We however cannot track that number due to
our next mistake.
Imagine having a child and letting it loose into the world, only you didn’t teach him/her to communicate with you in any way, shape, or form. That’s essentially what happened with Gravibounce. We poured all this work into a game and neglected to install a tracking API, such as MochiBot. Had we spent the extra 5 minutes it takes to install, we’d be looking at a detailed list of places our game has been and what it accomplished. We’d have graphs showing not only how many plays our game received, but from where and when as well. It goes without saying that this information would be invaluable, not only for our personal portfolios, but for planning an approach for our next release.
One of the other weaknesses in our market strategy was that we never really looked into specific sites that offer revenue share programs. Gravibounce had a much higher success rate then anticipated, so it would have definitely done well on these sites and at the very least earned us a few extra dollars, if not into the hundreds of dollars. Some of the sites that offer these programs are Fizzy and Kongregate, the lack of a list shows that we still have research to do in order to further this portion of our marketing plan. We did however learn of a new program when Tom Fulp of Newgrounds messaged me personally, asking if I was interested in joining the beta of their new revenue share program. I signed up quickly and that 50k+ views should bring us a nice bit of cash, I’ll update you on that amount when I receive payment in a month or so.
The most important thing to do no matter what is to make sure you like your idea and keep faith in your project. A prime example of this is with Gravibounce, we lost faith due to it’s lack of expected attention from sponsors. We were offered a performance like deal from Armor Games that would have seen us another $1,000 given our achievements on Newgrounds. The initial upfront pay was lower, but the bonuses added greatly, where as the deal we had was in the middle but risk free. In the end, we should have stayed positive about our game and taken the performance based deal, because despite the lack of attention it was getting, we knew our game was of great quality.
