Google featured our indie Android game: How Battlestation: First Contact got a nice boost of downloads.

Hey all you fantastic people. This is my first post here, I have my own blog byte of the week but wanted to start posting here as well.

Back in October 7th, we published our third mobile game Battlestation: First Contact. October 9th it got featured by Google and now I want to present you with some data of how it affected the launch of our game.

Above you can see the installs curve by user for a time period between October 9th and October 21st. We started from 0 pretty much, publishing a game on Google Play, or other mobile platforms for that matter, without marketing does not give you downloads at all. Long gone are the days when you could just launch your game and get installs from the platform itself.

We rised quickly to 20 000 downloads/day for a couple of days before the featuring spots changed and we started falling down. After this Battlestation: First Contact fell down to around 900/installs day. But why? As far as we know we do not get much visibility from top lists. We can only assume this is the combined result from word of mouth, keyword searches, recommendations for players and our own marketing efforts. There is a big risk that the downloads will continue to drop slowly, something that has always happened to us before.

So where did these installs come from? Let’s see at our top countries.

We actually got most downloads from United States, that’s really good. The difference in monetization between countries can be quite big. United States monetizes around 5-6 times better than Russia for our game. Other good countries are Germany and France, as well as United Kingdom. Let's see how our game managed to rise in rankings according to App Annie:

In total, we got a little over 100 000 installs from the featuring, which is of course awesome in every way. Still, it is much more important to achieve a stable long-term install rate. Something that you can work with as a company. If you get that 100 000 download burst and then drop down to 50 installs/day quickly it is very hard to receive enough revenue to keep a company going.

It is quite worrying that these amount of installs doesn’t really make a dent at the top lists, not even top new free. The lists are categorized by countries, you have to get a nice spike of downloads in one country to rise on that specific country top list. It is quite clear that if you don’t make it to those lists you will be left with some kind of scrap visibility.

What is this scrap visibility then? Word of mouth, Googles own recommended system (People that played this game played also that game) and your own marketing,  as far as we can tell.  What kind of stable download amounts have you guys been able to achieve on Android, iOS or Windows? It would be nice to hear from you!