What is Reddit's opinion of
Convicted: Jail Break?
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Popularity Score: 2
This app was mentioned in 3 comments, with an average of 1.67 upvotes
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Project title - Convicted: Jail Break
Promotion Type - self-promotion
Promoter's name and role - Andrew, role - game designer/programmer/marketing/making coffee
Links to the project - Play Market
Description
Convicted: Jail Break is a text-based quest/simulator of an inmate. The main goal of the game is to escape the prison. Game feature an action based system were you can perform different actions during the day. Each action has a chance to start an event that you'll need to solve. The game also features a crafting system (who doesn't?), a quest system (yet again who doesn't?) and you can also try to takeover the prison to gain a hefty profit out of it.
Currently available only for Android but might get to iOS sooner or later.
Heh, I'm almost in the same situation with my game ;) Although I can add some stuff and make a bit more comments on your post.
I've launched my game 3 weeks ago and yeah... I just see it slowly dying in agony and I just don't know what I can do to save it. I had a good start with some YouTubers that made a review on the game and bumped it into the top new rankings. The game is rated pretty much good (4.5 with about ~400 votes).
I worked as a game designer and have some skills in programming. So I teamed up with a 2D artist to help me make my game.
I haven't done any pre-release talking about the game. There's literally no need as far as I see for mobile games. PC games - yes probably. But there are thousands of games released each week on mobile and nobody would ever care about it.
I've probably made the same mistake with "unique" game route... I made a text-based quest. It's too niche and there's just not that much people that play these kinds of games. Furthermore I've chosen a prison theme which I think made the matter even worse. Not that much people will play a text-based quest in a prison setting :D
When I "went rogue" and quit the company I was working for to make games on my own I decided to drop every "trick" that the social game industry taught me. No viral mechanisms (I dropped them before the release to save time, they actually were in the initial design), no tutorial, no retention mechanics. Well at least my "I will never make a game with IAP" is still what I stick to :D I won't ever make games that have "you must suffer!" mechanics in it. Like timers, increasing difficulty, energy and that kind of bullshit.
Next mistake concerns only non-tier 1-2 country devs. I am myself from Ukraine. I launched the game in 2 countries initially (Russia + Ukraine). I then made the translations and released the new build worldwide. Play Market however seems to share your players among other countries. I.e. if you have lots of players from one country you might appear in the listing in an another one. 1.5 week has passed since worldwide release. I have less then 50 downloads worldwide. This is because my first "traffic bump" was 2 weeks before worldwide launch. So it didn't even affect the worldwide release.
Speaking about reviews... I contacted around 50+ review web-sites. Most of them replied with automated messages like "Yeah! Great game! You know that we have a sponsorship available, right?". Those that replied personally still had those lines there. You can't blame them. They get like hundreds of games sent to them every day. I'm just saying that you shouldn't waste your time writing them. Themed web-sites are a different thing. I was able to find a web-site focused around text-based games and they actually agreed to add me to their listing. Same with youtubers. I've written a dozen of them and none have even answered.
But here comes one fact that I know now :D You need approximately at least 500-1000 downloads with a good install/delete ratio to get to a good position in the top new ranking. If you have it organic users will come to your game. But as far as I as I know now.. You should spend at least some cash on the reviews. To get those 1k player base for starts.
I blame my inexperience in marketing and avoidance of some must-have industry standard mechanics that I should have added to the game.
If anyone would like to check out the game here's a link to Play Market: Convicted: Jail Break