Meteorfall — 3 Month Update
It’s been awhile since my last update (after the first month), so I decided it was time to do another one. This update also includes a bit about the recent Necrodude update and how it has affected sales.
By the Numbers
Meteorfall released Jan 25, 2018 so it’s been almost 4 months since the game launched. In this time, I released the ‘Necrodude Update’ which included Muldorf, a new character in the game. I discussed a bit in the previous updates about the Necrodude update and my design philosophy about it.
As of May 20th, Meteorfall has made $52,000 USD in non-China markets since the game launch. For those who saw Jake’s talk about ‘Spending too long on making your game’, he shares some numbers on predicting first year revenue based on first week sales. The average there is ~4.5x, and Meteorfall is just over 3x at this point. Meteorfall does about $150-$200 per day in proceeds (combined iOS and Android); depending on whether that is sustainable, Meteorfall could probably hit ~$90k in the first year, which is a little over 5x first week sales.
Android is about 30% of the sales total, with iOS at 70%. Android is slowly gaining on iOS — iOS has bigger spikes, but the long tail sales seem to be better on Android.
Necrodude Update — “Worth” It?
I was curious what effect the Necrodude update might have on sales. I’d heard that updating a game didn’t have much effect on sales, and I’d say that was somewhat true. Here’s a graph of the month preceding the update, plus the sales after. The update launched on May 9, and had some press before that on sites like Touch Arcade, Pocket Tactics, and Stately Play.
It looks like there is a small boost here around the time that sites started covering news about the update. This kind of makes sense — it’s not the update itself that generates sales; it’s people talking about the game at all that does. Some people suggested I charge for the update, which I did consider. I ultimately decided not to, as a reward to players who were willing to take a chance on a $2.99 premium game in the age of f2p. As mentioned before, I do game development as a hobby and not a job, so I’m fortunate enough to have the liberty to do something ‘just because’ without worrying about the opportunity cost. In this case, I was really happy with all the discussion & feedback I got about Muldorf from players, and was glad that everyone who had the game could experience that new content. It wouldn’t feel great to spend a ton of hours on a new character that maybe 5% of people would be able to enjoy.
What’s Next?
I’m planning on doing a bug fix update because as with all software updates, every change brings new problems. I’ve also started work on what I’m calling the ‘Demon Party’ update. This update was inspired by the Ascension Mode in Slay the Spire. I’m a player that only plays on normal difficulty 99% of the time (the one exception was in the brilliant Pyre, and only because the story would progress even if you lost). Because of this, I didn’t just want to add a ‘hard difficulty’ and call it a day.
The new difficulty unlocks for a character once you defeat the Uberlich with them. Whenever you start a new game, you’ll get a ‘quest’ to decide if you want to try the new difficulty, or stick with the current one. It will add a new rule to the game (eg: Monsters have 30% more health) . If you complete that the game with that rule in effect, you’ll add another rule to the game, which is cumulative with the first one. By the end, you’ll have a much more difficult challenge. Because the challenges are per character, it also represents a new form of progression. The characters on the ‘hero selection’ screen will get some new badges to show you how far you’ve progressed with each character. The new difficulties also come with score multipliers, allowing you to potentially climb higher on the leaderboard. At any time when starting a game, you can also choose to go back to ‘standard’ or any unlocked challenge level — if you decide that you hate one of the challenge rules, you can go back to an easier one.
I’m super excited about this update, and can’t wait to share more once it’s further along. There will also be 20–25 new cards added to the 5 new demon enemies, and most of these cards will find their way into hero’s card pools.
