Accounts created in 1 year and a half before the integration on Kongregate

38,000

This was done with almost no help at all by the way. I only did 1 interview recently, sent multiple press releases that were never posted anywhere but on low traffic websites, sent many mails to reviewers without receiving an answer, was featured once on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, mentioned on a few blogs and that’s about it.

The visitors came from what effort I could manage to do and the few ads I had the money to run.

Number of players that played for at least a full month at any time in that year and a half

1,500

Average number of active players per month BEFORE the integration on Kongregate

190

Active players that created their account on Kongregate (it’s been 1 week so far)

50

Number of accounts created on Kongregate after 1 week

1,900

I’d like to point out here that the game was only on the first page of the “New games” section for about 12 hours. After that it got buried deep deep down. I’m currently running a test ad campaign on Kongregate for 1 month.

Think 50 active players on 1,900 accounts created is bad? I think it’s actually not bad considering Kongregate mostly have casual Flash games. I’ll point that to play Golemizer on Kongregate there’s no account to create if you are already logged in with your Kongregate account. Of course you must pick the name and appearance of your character but there is no email validation or new username/password. Your Kongregate username is even inserted automatically as the name of your character. You can do the whole process in 5 seconds … 10 if you take the time to pick your clothes.

Analysis

Now you can say OMG your conversion rate is terrible!!! Before Kongregate only 4% of your accounts became active players! I have no clue, maybe it’s actually good?

If you think the game is rough right now just let me tell you that it was a lot worse at first. A lot lot worse so I’m actually making progress here. The recent upgrade of the tutorial should be one more thing helping.

It took only 1 week on Kongregate (where the game wasn’t easily found for most of the time) to reach 5% of what I’ve been able to reach in a year and half.

If we do simple math it means that 487 new accounts were created per week before Kongregate. Kongregate only by itself brought me almost 4 times that number in a week. It’s still early to speak about active players but that doesn’t look so bad so far.

So what does all of this tells me? As much as I’ll agree with everyone telling me the game is hard to learn, could be more polished, etc. it tells me it’s still doing amazingly fine. Sure I can work on improving the conversion rate for active players but it would still require an incredibly high percentage of conversion to have a decent number of active players per month. If you have a trick to convert 50% of people creating an account just to check the game in active players that will stay for at least a month I’m listening …

Yes! I’m coming back about exposure. Just improving the conversion just isn’t enough. I just don’t have the raw numbers. Put the game 1 or 2 weeks on the front page of Kongregate or anywhere else with good traffic and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was quitting my day job a few months later.

But then you’ll tell me “if your game is more polished THEN it will get more exposure”. Yes, I know. I just don’t have a “polished-o-meter” that will tell me “polished enough!”. So I keep working and improving things, still believing in my goal but what I’m trying to show you is that the game could already do very well as it is right now.

Let’s study an example

Let’s take an example so I can make my point. Craqua is a game that’s been published on Kongregate the same day as Golemizer so Frebuary 23rd. I could have picked Sushi Cat who is also in the Hot New Games section on the front page but it was just published yesterday as I’m writing this.

So Craqua is featured on the front page and in about 1 week the counter is at 94,781 plays. That’s more than twice the number it took me to reach in a year and a half …

The rating of Craqua is 3.68. Golemizer it’s currently at 3.43 (is bouncing from 3.43 to 3.45 for some days now). Craqua is a cute simple game extremely easy to play (move mouse hold button) and let’s pretend Golemizer is the most difficult game in the world to play. There’s not much that of a difference between the ratings considering the “polish” or the “how hard is it to play” factor.

How much money Craqua will make out of 94,781 plays? Can’t say for sure but the revenue will only come from ads so if I speculate a bit based on my shooter that took 3 days to make it should be about a gross earning of nearly $300 for that much plays.

How much money would Golemizer make on Kongregate? Well the ads would still be there but Golemizer also have a cash shop.  I don’t know how much I can say but my numbers BEFORE Kongregate are showing an ARPU almost as good as Puzzle Pirates and it would take a lot lot less than say 20,000 active players per month for me to make a good salary out of it. A lot lot less than that. In fact it would take so few that most people would think “hey, that game is not successful at all” but I’d be more than happy with it.

Of course if I make money others are also making money. So I’m telling you I want YOU to make money. Use and abuse Golemizer it’s there for you to make money. You might not make millions out of it but if it pays part of the salary of an employee isn’t it good enough?

So yes, I want you to make money out of me. There’s not much to do and I’m ready when you are! ;) I’ll keep working on improving the conversion rate and if you look around a bit about the history of Golemizer you’ll notice that in 1 year and a half I pushed 31 updates and numerous patches to improve the game. I’m not one that will let you down and I guess a few people could back me up on this.

Maybe things will just happen by themselves and the rating of Golemizer will suddenly reach 4 stars! Who knows! I just hope it will end up having a better rating than this one … ;)

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