Fledgling Videogame Developer

Hello All! For WestSloth Games year 2020 was mostly business as usual. We were still working part-time on game development within the time that was available. Sometimes there was no time at all and sometimes there was some spare time for gamedev. I any case, we accomplished and learned a lot during this year.  Here are some highlights: Major update for Flamingo Tap Tap Run Android game was released in the very beginning of the year. Some statistics with download numbers and ad impressions/eCPM values is revealed in separate blog article .  Couple of updates were done for Flamingo game. These included couple of bug fixes and API level updates. Biggest update introduced embedded minigame to get more shrimps.  A new variant for our previous rocket game was released in June 2020. Rocket Orbit can still be found from Google Play Store, although the number of downloads has so far been bit disappointing. In interested in details, please check separate blog article on rel...

Our reasonably popular Flamingo Tap Tap Run Android game is celebrating 1-year anniversary after a major update in the beginning of January 2020. In this update we introduced several playable Flamingo characters and did some improvements and fixes to gameplay.  Although the game has not been a real breakthrough, the number of new downloads has been fairly steady throughout the year. Advertising revenue has also been steady, and even increased towards the end of the year. We are still talking about less than 10 Euros per month, but with current investment and effort it is just ok. All Flamingo game downloads are organic , since no paid advertising used. And yes, we have not included any in-app purchases in any of our games. I collected couple of graphs showing how the total number of installations and number of new installations (28 days moving average) has developed since the very first launch date in September 2019. Major update was done in the beginning of 2020 and that has be...

I am sharing one more chart showing the daily " Turbomole Trial Run " views over last 61 days. So it's about 2 months since we released this flash game to Newgrounds. Total number of views is at the moment 46082, so there has been in average 755 views per day (source of data: Newgrounds Statistics). The number of daily views has varied between 35 and 3620. I am pretty happy to these figures, because two months ago we were expecting no more than 5000 views in total. Ad revenue has been very modest for "Turbomole". There is just one ad shown before title screen, and that's all. I didn't want to irritate players with large number of ads, so there are no between-scenes ads at all in this game. Also, the eCPM seems to be quite low for flash ads. Pre-roll ads would provide better eCPM, but the number of those has been disappointingly low... What makes the chart interesting is the recovery that has happened couple of times: The number of daily view...

The updated version of " Turbomole Trial Run " flash game was released to Newgrounds about 4 weeks ago, without much expectations. However, today game exceeded the limit of 30000 views, which is in our opinion pretty good achievement for game like this. I have to admit that I have no idea what is the typical number of gameplays for the average flash game. However, the predecessor games " Turbomole Xmas Run " (Dec 2013) and original "Turbomole Trial Run" (Feb 2014) were released using already deceased MochiMedia's distribution network. In principle it was possible to get game distributed to thousands of flash sites. But in the end the number sites was something between couple of tens and one hundred for both of these games. The life span for Xmas version was about 2 weeks, and for normal version bit more than a week. Also, the number of players was around couple of hundreds for each of them. So, nothing special to mention with these ones. For update...