Coin Run

Coin run was inspired by one of my friends who makes mobile games.

The complexities of coin run were small. I was able to complete coding coin run in about a day (although it took me around 6 days for the assets).

This was more of a marketing experiment than anything else. Games are way easier to make than utilities because most of the stuff you use in a game is polished and not really cutting edge. I wanted to see how marketing works with games hearing all the horror stories about marketing from one of my friends and he's games.

Reddit: I used reddit before for Blert and got 200+ downloads with one post "like highlander except with ringtones". I didn't realize how good that was until I posted this game up. I got about 50 downloads with about 5 posts on reddit.

Admob: Text ads seem like they don't work at all for games. I spent about 20 dollars with no downloads with text ads. I then turned to making banners and trying those. I found that image banners do a ton better but it still cost $1.35 an install for a total of 10 dollars. The installs seemed to come at me super fast but at $1.35 per install on a free game, it was defiantly too expensive for a small game like coin run. I can imagine a big company buying their way to the top 10 very quickly with this service though. Interestingly though if you set a budget to 5 dollars for a day, admob might spend 10 dollars and then end up charging you for 10.

Facebook: These ads were super chaotic. I played around with the targeting, banners and messages but the same combo might get 14 cents per download on one day and go up to over a dollar on another day. The downloads happened SUPER slow but if you set a budget at 5 dollars, it stops at 5 dollars. I can imagine someone with really good screenshots / banners / icons making money per day on an addicting game but as far as a big company buying their way to the top 10, i doubt it.

After reading a lot of blogs on the subject, I want to try and set a release date after the approve date and syncing everything together. I think I might write up another game real quick to see the effects of that. LOL it would seem curiosity is a time killer.

It turns out things that aren't very unique or obviously was put together super fast won't ever do well but I think they are still good indicators what will and won't work.

You can find game here when the game gets put in the store:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coin-run/id889252519?ls=1&mt=8