EnsenaSoft: Moving from Casual Mobile to Steam/Console

Getting started with educational and kids games for my children

When my wife and I first started EnsenaSoft in July of 2009, I really wanted to make children’s educational games.  I had already been living in Mazatlan, Mexico for about 10 years and our children were 4 and 8.  I had a strong background in programming for over 20 years and some talented developers and designers I had worked with on other projects.  The timing seemed right and iOS was really taking off so we made our plunge. 

As I saw my kids struggling with English, I liked to focus on games that helped teach English and other subjects. We had some initial success, but our first big hit was when we focused less on education, and more on fun, making Ultimate Hangman.  The team at EnsenaSoft started learning more about what it means to make games and how much we really had to learn.  So we focused on a lot of the board games that I grew up playing as kid and making digital version of them.  This is a very competitive field as each game may turn up 150 results even early on. But with sharp graphics and a focus on making them great, we excelled.  Our game Fantastic 4 In A Row also took off really well.

Switching to more casual games for my mom

Then my mother asked me to make a Mahjong game.  She had enjoyed mahjong games online for years.  We came out with Mahjong Deluxe around March of 2011 and it instantly became very popular.  While we may never understand the reason why it is popular, it has continued to do well on all platforms we have brought it to.  For this, we are incredibly grateful!

For the first 2 years of EnsenaSoft, we just had our Free versions with less levels, themes, content and our paid versions.  The Free versions had no ads and all revenue came from the paid versions.  In October of 2011 a company contacted us and was maybe interested in acquisition.  The problem was that we had no data on app usage and our revenue was very low (those were tough days).  So we implemented Flurry to get some basic analytics about how things were going.  Boy were we surprised with how many people were using our Free apps on a daily basic and never upgrading to our paid versions. 

So we decided to add in interstitial ads as our games were not really designed with ads in mind.  This made a huge difference to our revenue and now 95% of our revenue comes from ads.  Since adding in analytics in November of 2011, we have had almost 24 million new users playing 804 million sessions.  I know this is not big compared to Rovio, King or Supercell.  But it is enough for a small indie to keep going and try new things.

What our casual audience looks like

This has given us a very interesting audience for our current games.  While we don’t collect any personal information ourselves, the analytics engines are able to give us estimates based upon some sort of internal magic that they do.  Each user's age range and gender are estimated based on usage of specific applications and the vast amount of data collected across all applications using Flurry Analytics.

So, we currently have an audience that is 95% female and 90% aged 55 and above with another 9% aged 35 and above.  We had a great time over the following 3 years trying to make more casual games for this market and learn much more about casual games in general.  The additional ad revenue also allowed us to invest in new PCs or Macs and Unity Pro for the entire team and start learning more about 3d modeling, animation, Unity game development and 3d game development. 

Mobile has started to get really tough

While we have had some minor successes with Mahsung Deluxe and Mahjong Destiny, it started getting much harder to bring attention to our new mobile games as the app store has grown phenomenally.  It is just hard to stand out in a flood of 300-500 new games every day.  We do some cross promotion, but we really need to use our ads primarily for advertising to keep revenue coming in.  The cost of user acquisition also started to rise more and more. 

We still just have advertising in our Free games and Paid games and sometimes we have not even done paid versions as conversion is so low.  Advertising model is great, but it takes a lot of impressions to generate good money and the amount per install is still very low.  None of our games have IAP and this is something I am still very proud of to this day.  The IAP model really only works well for consumable items so that you can get some big whales and it is just not a model I have wanted us to embrace.  Perhaps if we had, my opinion of mobile and our revenue per game would be higher.

We also maybe made some games that were undesirable in our desire to experiment with 3d worlds when this is not the type of game that has done well on mobile and particularly not with the aged 55 and above audience.  Sometimes things in 3d that move around a lot can cause dizziness or nausea.  Sometimes even the extra particle effects when a match is made can bother them.  Sometimes we have made clones of whatever seemed popular.  While a good learning experience, those are the games that have done least well.  For whatever the reason, the vast majority of our revenue still comes from the games we made in 2010 and 2011.  But we learned an incredible amount lot along the way.

Making games for ourselves

Since we were not getting any new traction on casual mobile, we decided we might as well take the blessing of a somewhat steady revenue stream and bet the farm on a new direction.  We decided to start making games that we liked.  We want to make great games that are wonderful fun, thought provoking and have limited amounts of violence. It is with this in mind that we started a project called MOP: Operation Cleanup early in 2013.  This is a hard core platformer that we hope to have finished by the end of this year.  All of the graphics and levels are developed in house. We worked with a professional audio firm, Somatone, for the audio on this game and it really shows.  I will write more about this as it gets closer to completion.

In 2014 several team members and I started working on Miko Mole.  This is an arcade puzzler that takes some great ideas from the Dig Dug and Boulder Dash, fun games of my youth, and some recent indie games I have really enjoyed including Stealth Inc 2, Unmechanical and Worms Battlegrounds.  For the 3d characters and animations we have worked with Meta3dStudios in Austin, Texas and they have also been doing a huge amount of work on the level design.  Working with a professional level designer that only focuses on that has been a great experience. I will go more into the making of Miko Mole using Unity in an article very soon.

Anyhow, as these games progressed, it became clear that they were certainly not designed for our current mobile audience and probably not really designed for a mobile audience at all.  I love playing games on the console myself and with my children, who are now aged 10 and 14.  Many of our team members play games on Steam as well on consoles.  We started to feel that these were the right platforms, with the right audience and the right business model for us.  

When we started 6 years ago, we were not ready to make games for these platforms.  We have learned so much about game design, level design, graphic design, sound design and we still have so much more to learn.  These are the platforms we love and play games on.  We believe our newest games are well at the level of quality in all aspects to be enjoyed by the people on these platforms.  We don’t want to make games that are Free with ads and IAP that depends on whales. We want to make games that people love and that we love.

While about 2 years in, this is the very start of our new adventure.  We just released Miko Mole onto Steam Greenlight and I would appreciate your votes.

I promise to share more articles on Gamasutra about what we learn on this new path and how it turns out.  I have been so inspired by so many articles from everyone in this community over the last 6 years.  I love checking the site at the end of every week day to see what is new.