Our Analysis of Marketing a Premium iOS App

Hey everyone, it's been a while since our last business post. We've been working hard developing our next game, Flying Fortress RPG. (Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7CtdnW9hcY)

So far we've learned that the iOS premium market is difficult. Nameless the Hackers is still floating around ranks 200-300 in the paid RPG category, but being honest, it only takes 10 purchases to get ranked. You can check out some of the research we did back in May here.

The following are some of our marketing experiences.

iTunes Link (Full Version): http://nth.box.cat
iTunes Link (Lite Version): http://nthl.box.cat

Our sales were pretty bad towards the later side of our adventure. Some days we made $4 USD, some days zero. Nameless was priced at $2.99 at the time.

We tried many things:

One thing we knew that might have been a problem, were the thin margins of mobile games. Turns out, yes --- very dire affects. An extremely thin margin of profit didn't give us any flexibility. Here's a hypothetical of how a product with a healthy margin might help.

So if $19 dollars worth of marketing can make you one sale, you have a survivable product.

In the mobile games category, we found that our users are niche, in niche. JRPGs/RPGs haven't quite established themselves in the US mobile space. Most JRPG players gamers are on DS, Vita, or PS3.

We're an iOS exclusive company. We felt that iOS is where the premiums paying customer were, which statistically speaking, they are:

Source: Video Game Intelligence, VGI - "Game Monetization strategies 2013-14"

The graph makes iOS look like candy land, but tapping into our specific niche segment has been difficult. At the moment, we see the biggest problem is Discovery.

Here are a few things working against us:

Mobile players not spending time to look up new games

This one's a bit obvious, but it's worth mentioning. As a mobile market, all users are on-the-go. They do not have the time to look up what the latest new game are. To some degree, the AppStore actually makes it too easy and users usually only scroll through the top 50 or top 100.

Only a subset of players are looking up critic reviews and game articles.

Premium games don't have ads

For any player that is enjoying a premium game, that game usually doesn't have any ads in it. This makes it difficult to move players from one premium experience into another.

Flood of Apps

At the time of this writing, 148apps.biz metrics are showing about 207 games/day reaching an average of 2,280 games / month. Check out these awesome stats hosted by 148apps.biz:

Screen capture on 2013-11-11 23:10:20 -800 PST

Source: http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/

Knowing all this, we decided to do it anyways -- why? Because you never know unless you try.

Because our game was hacker-cyberpunk, we felt that  our ad-targeting is extremely narrow. Narrow targeting is expensive. On top of that, ad-networks don't really curate their targeting options for our type of users (Premium). This meant we would have to spend more to attract less.

After some basic testing, we found that user acquisition costs for us something like $3.50-$5.50 for our specific type of players on our specific type of product.

This is due to a few things:

Anyhow, the math for Nameless RPG in the current state of the advertising Eco-system just didn't line up.

A user acquisition cost of $3.50 to $5.50 would be too much for us.

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