This app was mentioned in 9 comments, with an average of 4.11 upvotes
"Successful" usually means you earned back your costs, and ideally made some profit. Costs don't just include literal money spent during production, but also time (if you didn't pay yourself a salary).
So, factor in how long you worked on the game, and multiply that by a reasonable hourly salary, then add all of your miscellaneous costs (software, hardware, etc)...the result is your operating cost. To consider your game a real success you have to earn at least all of that back.
Of course, there are 'personal' successes, like 'finish a game' or 'release a game onto the app store', etc. But none of those milestones really count for much in the real world...otherwise we'd have to consider every single app ever released a success.
Since you want comparative stats, I've had <strong>The Quest Keeper</strong> out on the Play Store for about 3.5 weeks. Right now it's sitting at just under 100k installs. It's made about $2000 in ad revenue and in-app purchases, which isn't even close to being profitable considering the 2 months development timeline. That said, the <strong>iOS version</strong> has done much better, and made the game very profitable.
To be honest, I've never had much financial success on the Play Store, but all three of my releases were featured on the Apple App Store, so that's had a massive impact on sales/downloads. The Amazon App Store is even worse than Google Play...I think my games have about 3000 installs, combined....even after one of them was featured in an Amazon promo.
The Quest Keeper
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tysonibele.questkeeper
Simple, but fun. The IAPs are fair. Big one being no ads, and you don't need to buy extra coins to easily enjoy the game, and there's an option to simply watch a 15 second ad instead of paying money for more coins.
The Quest Keeper
A fantasy RPG inspired by Crossy Road: help a lowly peasant become a powerful dungeon master!
Features:
10 different, challenging quests
Tons of unlockable items and upgrades
Collectable coins and artifacts
Endless, procedurally generated fun!
It came out just this morning on Android! <strong>Grab it here!</strong>
The Quest Keeper was unleashed onto <strong>iOS</strong> this week. It hit <strong>Android</strong> at the end of last week as well.
I was lucky enough to get featured by Apple so it's doing pretty well so far. I also implemented portrait mode and top-down-view mode for players that were finding the orthographic perspective frustrating.
<strong>Here's</strong> the official trailer.
<strong>Here's</strong> some artwork I made for it this week.
Feedback welcome!
Bonus question: Nope, never.
If you like this game you might be interested in a very similar one called The Quest Keeper.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tysonibele.questkeeper
Sounds like The Quest Keeper