Blog Archive

We are happy to announce that Game Dev Tycoon is coming to Nintendo Switch on October 8th. Our friends at Rarebyte, who are responsible for the amazing iOS and Android port, put the same attention to detail and care into porting it to Switch and the game just feels right at home on the console. We can’t wait for you to try it.

Here is our announcement trailer:

With the Switch release, Game Dev Tycoon will be available on PC (Windows, Mac, Linux), iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android (mobile, tablet and Chromebook) and Nintendo Switch. With so many different platforms, we thought it would be nice if we allowed players to play wherever they prefer so we set to implement cross-platform save support. In hindsight this was quite the hassle as the PC and mobile version used different save formats but we struggled through and are happy to announce that the cross-platform save feature will come to all platforms in a free update. It will allow any player to upload their save files and get a short save-code which they can then enter on whatever device they want to continue their play-session.

Stay up to date

If you want to be notified when the game becomes available, and if you want to stay up to date on our other upcoming game, please sign up to our newsletter here:

https://bit.ly/3grbBTS

It’s been five whole years since Game Dev Tycoon released on Steam. Time for a brief illustrated trip through the game’s history.

Back in 2011, my brother Daniel and I (we are both software developers) decided that we wanted to try to make a game. After days of brainstorming and discussions, we settled on the idea of making a game dev simulator. We were inspired by Game Dev Story on the iPhone (made by Kairosoft) and wanted to make a game in that genre with our own spin on it. Our intention was to make a game dev simulator where the player would have finer control over the decisions of what to focus on during game development.

Game Dev Tycoon started, as many games do, on a single piece of paper.

Back then, we imagined the game as a turn-based game with almost no graphics for phones. Our plan was to create a small but fun game to gain experience and test the market.

This is what the game looked like as a prototype.

We spend a few months in this prototype developing the algorithms on how points are generated, what decisions players make, and how virtual games are reviewed and judged.

Next, we realized how difficult it would be to be successful on mobile without a big marketing partner so, when Windows 8 (remember Windows 8?) was announced, we pivoted hard towards Windows. Our plan was to make Game Dev Tycoon the first simulation game on the very first Windows Store which we thought was a decent marketing strategy.

Windows 8 was all about tablets and touch-screens so our designs – intended for phones – no longer cut it. We changed from a turn-based simulation game with almost no graphics to a real-time isometric simulation game where you see your office at all times.

Windows 8 only had two reasonable technology choices: C++ with Microsoft’s Windows-specific XAML frontend or HTML5. We both had XAML experience and Daniel is a great C++ developer (me, less so :D) but we also both disliked XAML. More importantly, while we heavily bet the game on Windows 8, we had enough experience in the Microsoft ecosystem not to trust the hype blindly. If the Windows 8 Store would flop, what would we do? With that in mind we opted to go for a versatile cross-platform technology instead of what we knew and decided to write our game in HTML5. Neither Daniel nor I had ever written anything in HTML5 before.

We took our prototype and ported it from C# to JavaScript. We also changed our algorithms from turn-based to real-time.

In May 2012 the game looked like this:

What followed was months of intense work to make the Windows 8 launch deadline. Moving to HTML5 was mostly easier than I personally expected but it did take me a whole day to figure out how to stack buttons on top of each other in CSS, not to mention how to center things 😀

Initially, both Daniel and I worked on the game as a side project to our full time jobs but we soon realized that we needed to give it much more attention. I transitioned out of my job and put my savings from 10+ years as a software engineer behind the project to hire artists and finish the game on time, while Daniel worked hard next to his job and on weekends. If my money would run out, he’d have to support us both.

It was an intensely stressful and uncertain time full of the highs and lows of indie development.

Three months later, we published a free ‘lite’ version which just contained the first level of the game on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview store. The rest of the game wasn’t even close to being finished yet.

This looks very familiar at a glance but in the final version we replaced the 3D modeled characters by more cartoony 2D ones and reworked the level art to be more crisp, stylized, and colorful. We also ditched the cut-off wall look.

Left: preview style. Right: release graphics.

We were quite nervous releasing just a preview game but within days we had nearly a thousand downloads and 4.5 star reviews. We were the very first simulation game on the Store.

Fueled by the positive response and early reviews, we put our heads down and developed the rest of the game. Here are a few images from the process.

This is the evolution of our second level. From basic sketch and a painted version in our old art-style to complete reboot and finally a vector draft which is quite close to what we ended up with.

By the time we designed the last level we had optimized our design process. Below you see a much more streamlined progression from sketch to layout concept to final piece.

On the UI front, we quickly decided against a more commonly seen fancy UI and instead focused on big readable text and minimalism. Here is a comparison between an early design versus what it ended up looking like.

After 8 intense months of work, Game Dev Tycoon launched on the Windows 8 Store on December 11th, 2012. With around 420 sales on day 1, we made it to spot 3!

Sadly, Windows 8 and particularly the Windows Store didn’t quite reach the adoption we had hoped for and sales quickly dropped and leveled out. We knew that we had to port the game to a wider audience if we wanted to be able to work on another game full-time.

Our previous decision not to use Windows-Store-only technology for the game now proved crucial and within a few months we made the game run on desktops for Windows/Mac and Linux.

Late April 2013, we published the game on our own store via our website. At the same time we released a modified version on torrent site as a little piracy experiment. I still remember saying that after working non-stop on the game for over a year, I was planning to take a week off. I was just gonna publish the results of our piracy experiments first.

I published the story late at night, went to bed and when I woke up the next morning everything was on fire. Our piracy story went viral overnight. We had 500 emails in our inbox. Our website was down because it couldn’t handle the traffic and Game Dev Tycoon was suddenly discussed everywhere.

We were utterly unprepared for the sudden spotlight. Emails kept flooding in and because of the sudden influx of players so too did the bug reports. At the same time the discussion around our experiment exploded and the press wanted to talk to us.

We hired some help to handle emails but decided to listen to our players and retreated from the spotlight to focus on the game instead. With all the new players, lots of valuable feedback and critique was brought to our attention and after we were Greenlit for a Steam release we decided to address those concerns. Four months later, this resulted in the release of the improved Steam version on August 30th, 2013.

Steam in 2013.

Since the original Steam release a lot has happened.

– We have released 58 updates to the game.
– Most recently, a major content and quality-of-life update introducing new topics, everyone’s favorite new console, a brand new game mode and several important UX improvements went live for free.
– The technology we developed (and open sourced) to enable Steam support for our game has now been used in 23 other Steam games.
– Game Dev Tycoon has been ported to iOS and Google Play.
– We have manually replied to nearly 40K emails in five years.
– Our modding community is still going strong with hundreds of mods and dozens which go far beyond simple content additions. From the ever-green most subscribed mods to more recent additions like the Compact Topic & Genres mod and the much anticipated upcoming TAG MOD.

Screenshot from the upcoming TAG MOD by Bellwood Studios.

We are incredibly honored and humbled by the success of Game Dev Tycoon and for the past five years we have turned this small two-brother team into a seven-people indie studio and poured our heart into developing our next game: Tavern Keeper. It’s not ready yet but we plan to write an update in coming weeks and give you a better idea of what to expect.

Quite an old screenshot by now. We’ll aim to share more soon.

Please consider following our developer page and sign up to our newsletter if you want to know more. We are also thinking of doing a special Game Dev Tycoon developer stream in a week or so. If you’d be interested in that, please let us know in the comments.

–
Patrick Klug
Greenheart Games 💚

As promised, to celebrate the release of the iOS and Google Play version of Game Dev Tycoon, we’ve now updated the Desktop versions of the game. Here are the goodies:

Pirate Mode

Try your luck surviving the harsh realities of piracy in this new ultra-hard game mode in which you have to invent DRM and sell company shares to survive.

You can find the pirate mode under the advanced options when starting a new game.

We’ve also added two new achievements:

New Review Screen

Inspired by the mobile UI, we’ve revamped the review screen with now 100% more star-power.

Disclaimer: Sudden rushes of anger from receiving a bad score from All Games is unchanged but the feeling of elation from receiving amazing scores is increased by several measurable units of excitement!

New side bar messages

Messages and events can now appear in a new sidebar instead of opening automatically and interrupting gameplay.

Messages can stack. You can click on them to read the message (or right-click to dismiss them). They will gently pulse and disappear if you ignore them too long.

We’ve tuned the default settings to be ideal for first-time players but experienced players can control which type of messages should auto-popup and which should appear in the sidebar in the new “Messages” settings tab:

New Topics, Icons & Drag to Scroll

We felt that the un-modded game lacked a few core topics that prevented players from re-making their favorite game in Game Dev Tycoon. This release adds 15 new topics to the game to enable more game combinations and, while we were at it, we completely redesigned the topic picker with shiny new icons.

Adding topic icons made the topic list a bit bigger, so we took this as an opportunity to add kinetic scrolling to lots of scrollable elements in the game. If you want to quickly browse the topic list now just click, drag, and flick it!

👩🏽‍💻 Women in Tech 🏆

We were made aware of a pretty sad bug where the ‘women in tech’ event in the game did not alter the gender balance of job applicants. We have now fixed this and also added a lot more famous women game developers to the game.

In related news, the default character when starting a new game is now randomized and there is a random character button for you to press too.

Swap and late-game PC

Turns out that Ninvento can’t stop innovating! We have added the Ninvento Swap to the platform list, including a corresponding news story telling you all about bitter cartridges. We have also added a new late-game PC image to the game.

Modders 🛠

Existing mods should continue to function as they have before but we have added a few new features which modders can make use of:

– Mods can now add an (optional) icon to their topics by specifying an iconUrl (documentation).
– Mods can now add their own settings UI to the game’s settings-panel via a call to `GDT.addSettingsTab(title, content);` (documentation).
– Mods can spawn messages in the new sidebar. (documentation).
– The game now ships the Greensock GSAP animation library which modders can use to its full potential (documentation).

Thanks for playing! 💚

Hope you all enjoy this free update. We will now head back into fantasy land and focus on our second game. We hope we can talk more about it soon. If you haven’t done so yet, *please* sign up to our newsletter on tavernkeeper.com.

How to get the update

– If you are on Steam or itch.io, the update should be delivered to you automatically.
– If you bought the game from us directly, then you can re-use your original download link to download the game. In case you can’t find it anymore or the link doesn’t work please write a quick email to orders@fastspring.com (our payment providers) and they will resend you your link. If you have any troubles at all, get in touch with us via support@greenheartgames.com and we’ll help.
– If you bought the game on Humble or MacGameStore please download the new version from your account page.
– If you are a Linux user please note that we are still working on the Linux downloadable distributables. They should be ready in a day or so. If you are on Steam, it’s all good as the new version is already available for Linux there.

Full changelog

v1.6.11
–New: super-difficult ‘pirate’ game mode including new piracy, DRM and company ownership game mechanics.
–New: Added Ninvento Swap console and 100% more mentioning of denatonium benzoate in the game.
–New: Added new modern PC image.
–New: UI panels have now a kinetic drag behaviour.
–New: Updated review screen with new star animations.
–New: Added 15 new topics.
–New: Nicer topic and genre picker with all new topic and genre icons.
–New: Added icons to context menu.
–New: New message sidebar where messages can appear without interrupting gameplay.
–New: New ‘Messages’ settings allow you to set which in-game messages should auto-popup and which should open in the new sidebar.
–New: Character can now be randomized when starting a company.
–New: Settings, achievements and highscore panels are now draggable.
–New (modding): Mods can now add their own settings panel via GDT.addSettingsTab(title,jqueryContent);
–New (modding): Custom topics can now specify a iconUrl to show a custom icon (otherwise generic fallback is used).
–New: Modders can now make use of greensocks GSAP animation library: https://greensock.com/gsap
–Improved: Added more famous women to the game.
-Added: Translations of new content.
-Improved: Removed UI selection outline from slider handle.
-Improved: Added visual clue when there are not enough research points to start a research project.
-Improved: Small story window is now slightly wider.
-Improved: Sponsoring the women in tech event now causes more women to apply for jobs.
-Improved: Combobox in new game window is now larger.
-Improved: The default character when starting a new company is now randomized.
-Changed: Progression hint messages are now categorized as company milestones and will auto-open by default.
-Fixed: Randomize character button in company creation screen has missing icon.
-Fixed: Animation sounds would sometimes continue playing when starting a new game.
-Fixed: Typewriting animation would sometimes speed up on the intro screen when starting a new game.
-Fixed: Several buttons do not play a sound when clicked.
-Fixed: It was possible to have a game that never went off the market if a company had lost all fans and then released another bad game.
-Fixed: The splashscreen is no longer draggable.
-Fixed: When stories picked team members, often the first staff got picked.

Welcome to the surprising second part of our Android release reports. If you missed part one, you can catch up on it here.

In this report, I had expected to write about sales numbers and piracy rates but given the series of mind-boggling events this past week, this will have to wait a little.

After the phenomenal reaction on our first day, things continued quite well, and by day six, we had an unbelievable rating of 5.0 from over two thousand players.

The exact average rating was 4.96 (99.2% 5-stars) but Google Play shows everything above 4.95 as a clean 5.0

We were so excited until, an hour later, we mysteriously lost 438 of our 5-star reviews. Within a moment, over 25% of all our reviews were just gone.

A mystery

Confused, we took to twitter and asked our players whether anyone could confirm that their review had disappeared and, sure enough, minutes later, multiple confirmations came trickling in.

It looked like Google was removing genuine reviews from our Store page, en masse.

A bit of research brought up a story from a year ago (source) that puts the blame on Google’s algorithm for fighting fake reviews and concluding that genuine reviews are also deleted by it as collateral damage. This particular story talked about losing 4-6 reviews a day. We had just lost over 400.

But our troubles weren’t over. The next day, we lost another 430 reviews. Two days later another 655 reviews were silently removed and then another 500+, gone forever.

By our calculations, if Google’s algorithm hadn’t intervened, we would have nearly 3,000 reviews by now. Instead, 13 days after our release, we have 25 fewer reviews (622) than what we had on the first day. Google seems to have quietly removed at least 77% of all our reviews.

We are lucky that despite the culling of thousands of 5-star reviews, only a handful of people rated the game 3-stars or lower and so our average is still a respectable 4.92 but even so, the question of Why? burns in our minds.

Playing fair

We are not engaging in any dubious practices regarding reviews. We don’t incentivize reviews, we don’t buy reviews, we don’t review the game ourselves and we don’t even tell our friends to review it. The only way we encourage reviews is through an in-game reminder on the mobile version which seems to be the industry standard. In short, there is no reason we can think of to explain why our reviews should have disappeared.

Google responds

We reached out to Google about this mystery and they got back to us within a day (thanks!). They told us that our ratings were removed on purpose and pointed us to their Comments and Ratings policy. They also said that they triple-checked that this was done in according to their policies.

Further questions for clarification were politely declined, again pointing to above policy but refusing to be transparent about particular reasons.

The policies page mentioned by Google is divided into two sections.

One section lists specific policies to prevent abuse which contain things like: “Don’t post content that is abusive or hateful or threatens or harasses others” and “Don’t post fake reviews intended to boost or lower ratings”

The other section is labelled guidelines and tips and states things like: “Keep it readable; don’t use excessive capitalization and punctuation” and “Try to include both positives and drawbacks”.

We asked our players if they would be willing to share the review text that was removed from Google. Lots of them just gave the game a 5-star rating without a custom text. It’s puzzling how a review without text can be against a content policy but even more puzzling is that hand-written reviews like the following one, were also deleted:

Awesome little game that is great to play for 5 minutes or 5 hours. Also one of the best (and best working) ports I’ve seen onto mobile and an all round good time.

one of the reviews silently deleted by Google

Can you spot a policy violation?

Unless Google actually treats the guidelines and tips section as policy and sees a review without downsides as a violation there is just no reasonable cause for this review to have been removed. Unfortunately, because Google are not transparent about their practices and have no accountability for their actions, we have no way to oppose this.

Why is Google doing this?

My best guess is that Google uses the same algorithm to identify fake reviews on both free-to-play games and premium games.

I’m sure there are heaps of services out there that would add hundreds of very positive reviews for cheap on a free-to-play title because cheaters could setup hundreds of fake Google Play users and don’t have to fork out money to purchase a game to review it. Google probably invented and tuned the algorithm to remove these kind of fake reviews from free-to-play titles, but for a premium title, where everyone pays 5$ to even be allowed to write a review, this just doesn’t make any sense.

Disrespecting players but respecting pirates

I’m not so upset that our ratings are now 4.92 instead of 4.96, particularly because I assume that this affects everyone on the Google Play store.

What upsets me most is that this completely disrespects our players. Google lets an algorithm and a machine wipe genuine human expressions from history. Around 3,000 people on this planet not only bought and played the game but then spent extra time to tell others about it. A blink later their voice has been erased forever.

It’s also interesting that Google seems content with removing thousands of reviews left by genuine paying customers on their own store front, yet doesn’t have any safe-guards to prevent hundreds of pirate sites showing up on Google when someone searches for ‘download Game Dev Tycoon APK for free’. Surely, an algorithm could help there…

Anyway, more on the topic of the incredible eco-system of pirated APKs, in a future report.

– Patrick Klug
💚 Greenheart Games

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Yesterday, Game Dev Tycoon released on Google Play. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, just click on the image below.

Since our iOS release reports received a lot of interest (you can read part one, part two, part three and part four), we decided to do the same with our Android release. Here we go with our first report.

Release Day

Given our experience with the App Store – where the link to our game didn’t work consistently and were we did not show up in any lists for nearly the whole day – we decided to do a soft-launch on Android instead. Our scheduled release-time was 2PM UTC but we hit the release button a good four hours earlier.

The release went live practically immediately but similar to the App Store, the game didn’t show up in listings on the store page for the entire day. Thankfully the link to the store page worked without a hitch though.

On the first day on the store, we sold 2,218 units total. For comparison, our iOS release on the first day saw 1,463 sales. Android outperformed iOS by 52%. This is not a surprising result considering that the majority of these purchases are likely from our core fans and taking into account that the link to the iOS version did not work for the majority of the first day (we reported), while Android had no such issues.

We also knew that there was substantial interest. When we asked for Android testers, we received 2,500 applications within a mere three hours (vs. just 700 for iOS over two weeks).

Response

On day 1, Game Dev Tycoon received 647 reviews. 97.7% of players rated the game 5 stars. From all the reviews only 15 players rated the game 4 stars and not a single one rated it lower than 4 stars.

For comparison, the iOS release received 86 ratings on the first day so Android saw 652% more ratings than iOS. In fact, 28% of all genuine Android players have rated the game 5 stars and nearly half of those wrote a custom review!

I am truly overwhelmed and humbled by this. Thank you all so much for the amazing reaction! I’d like to give credit to Rarebyte who are in charge of the iOS and Android port and evidently did an amazing job preparing the release. I’d also like to thank our many Beta testers who helped iron out bugs and issues this past month. It has clearly paid off.

Release Day Blues

Release day is always stressful. It feels like there is always something that requires attention and this time was no different.

In our first iOS report I talked about how difficult it is to reach our audience. Both Facebook and Twitter changed their timeline algorithms in the past years to essentially make it impossible to reach your followers without paying lots of money.

This leaves our newsletter as our most valuable asset but sadly our open rates are much lower than they used to be. This is likely due to changes in how email providers categorize emails (Google’s introduction of the ‘Promotion’ tab had a hugely negative effect) but also because of mistakes on our end: we didn’t write subject lines that were catchy enough and ironically our resolution not to SPAM people and only sending emails when we have something to say (sometimes going nearly two years between emails) meant that email providers would look at us as a ‘new sender’ and were more likely to classify us as SPAM.

Newsletter woes

To counteract this and re-engage with our followers, I decided to experiment a little with our newsletters and as a first step I wanted to bring a little color into our subject lines by using emojis!

This was the idea:

Nothing too fancy or crazy. Just adding some friendly color. I actually wanted to do this last time for the iOS release too but our newsletter software didn’t seem to support emojis and I had no time to check on release day. This time, we were already prepared because thankfully an updated version of the newsletter software does support emojis. We use sendy.co to send out newsletters because everything else is outrageously expensive with a list our size (Mailchimp and CampaignMonitor would cost us nearly 1,500 $ every time we send where Sendy costs a fraction at not even 15$).

Sendy all updated and ready, I drafted the email and sent it as a test to several people for proof-reading and checking using the built-in ‘Test-send this newsletter’ feature. It came out really well and after double and triple checking everything again I sent the newsletter to our nearly 144K subscribers.

Seconds later I received the email and it looked like this:

Well, 💩. Panic mode: engaged 🚨 (especially since there is no stop/pause sending button).

Thankfully, our ever watchful system administrator was immediately available to nuke the process which sent the newsletter but some damage was already done: We just sent 6K people a broken newsletter. Ugh.

Our investigations into the configuration and database revealed nothing. It seemed that we configured it all correctly and the test emails definitely work. Defeated and out-of-time, I took my modern ambitions of emojis in newsletters and put them into the 🗑. Maybe next time.

I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about not getting to inject some emojis. At least our Google Play listing has the most number of emojis I have ever seen on a games description page. For no good reason, here are all of them in order of appearance: 🎮 💚 🕹 ✍ 💡 👁 ⚙ 🏢 👩🏽‍💻 🔬 📈 💚 🥇 ☠ 📰 👩‍🍳 📱 ⭐ – Makes sense, right?

Piracy on Android

On iOS, we did not see any piracy for the first 5 days on the store. Android is a markedly different story.

Within hours of us publishing the game we saw websites copy the Google Play store description and provide their own download pages including download links to a Game Dev Tycoon APK (the downloadable package that contains our game). Most of these sites are infested with ads and probably a good chunk give you malware but there are definitely genuine pirated versions out there.

How many people play a pirated version is hard to say. Our best estimate, based on tracking data and some assumptions, is that on day one around 40% played an illegal copy which seems close to the 50% recently reported by the developers of Hidden Folks.

What we hear from other developers, we need to expect that this will go up a fair bit and will most likely surpass the 55% we saw on iOS. We will talk more about this in future reports when we have more data.

Charts

To our knowledge the game did not appear in charts on the first day and AppAnnie does not seem to track the game yet but this morning we saw the game appear at Nr. 2 in Top Selling New Games. Here is a screencap:

Interestingly, even though the game showed as Nr. 2 Top New game and Nr. 14 Top Selling games overall, it was not part of the Top 540 Top Grossing lists at all. Perhaps the store did not update properly or perhaps the cliff between freemium and premium games on Android is even bigger than on iOS. We should be able to get a better idea in a few days when there is more data but without the amazing reaction from our fans we couldn’t have dreamt of hitting the charts within 24 hours.

Thank you all!

– Patrick Klug
💚 Greenheart Games

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Game Dev Tycoon is now available on Google Play. If you have been waiting for the Android version you can finally get your hands on it here.

Enjoy 💚

This is part 4 of our Game Dev Tycoon mobile release analysis.

• Part 1: A Rough Start
• Part 2: Steady Improvements
• Part 3: Game of the Day!
• Part 4: Good News

Happy New Year, everyone! Before we get into the latest data from the iOS release (spoiler: lots of good news!), I wanted to give a quick update on the Android and PC update.

Sales

Our last report was just after Game Dev Tycoon got featured in the US (and UK) as Game of the Day and discussed the short-term impact of that feature showing a dramatic increase in sales and the hint of a fall back to pre-feature levels. As a reminder, this is what our sales graph looked like on Day 7:

We didn’t get around to writing part 4 before Christmas but now that the new year has started, we have even more data to show. Here is our latest sales graph showing 42 days on the App Store.

As you can see the feature gave a massive boost which lingered for about a week before sales fell quite dramatically to the lowest levels so far. Thankfully, the downward trend didn’t last long as Christmas Day gave a boost again and resulted in better sales throughout the holidays. We hope Game Dev Tycoon provided some relaxing holiday gaming! The new year started off well too with several feature placements in Europe (UK, France, Belgium) providing another spike – albeit much, much smaller than the first one – near the end of the graph.

Overall, Game Dev Tycoon on iOS has now sold 66,520 units bringing in 241,615 USD in proceeds. After the initial rough start this is simply amazing and means that we have now made back our investment of 190K and are looking at a pre-tax profit of 50K. – Thank you all for playing! 💚

Chart positions

Above you can see the chart positions (according to AppAnnie) and proceeds in the US market across the 42 days of sale. During the Game of the Day feature we made it to the Top 5 paid position for three days which was our best position and consequently resulted in the largest sales. Our best position in the Top Grossing charts was at position 265 which explains why the Top 100 Grossing charts barely ever have any paid apps in them. Freemium simply dominates the market.

What’s also interesting is just how steep sales fall once you step down the chart ladder. Below you can see the proceeds plotted against the chart positions.

At position 5, our best day, we saw around 15K proceeds. At position 6, only one step down(!), we made just half of that (53%), at position 17 we made only a third (27%) and once you hit the low 100s we were looking at around 4-6% of what we made on our best day.

Interesting outliers are due to generally increased sales during the holidays and weekends. On Christmas Day for example, we were at position 82 but this still saw around 22% of what we made on our best day.

While the difference in the Top 20 charts is simply massive, the difference in the lower numbers isn’t quite as dramatic. Our worst chart position at spot 186 had still about 86% of the sales of what we saw at position 102 so while it’s true that the very top paid apps make the majority of the sales, you can still make a sizable income at the lower end of the charts if you manage to hold your position over multiple weeks.

Ratings and Reviews

Our ratings on the App Store are still great with an overall rating of 4.8 and an incredible 4.9 in the US (beaten by Australia which sits at 5.0 at the moment). We are slowly trending towards a 4.9 overall which is just incredible.

It’s truly humbling to see just how much players enjoy our game. I’m also happy to say that most 1-star reviews are now based on opinion rather than technical issues so it seems that our latest patches have fixed nearly all problems with the game.

Likely Piracy

With all the good news out of the way, let’s take a look at some bad news. While we were stunned to see that iOS didn’t show any signs of piracy initially, we are now fairly confident that there is sizeable piracy at work. For a while Game Dev Tycoon was listed in the Top spot on several iOS piracy sites and it shows when we look at our usage data.

What you see above is a chart comparing our confirmed sales numbers with the number of unique (but anonymous) users our analytics software tracks. The difference between those numbers is a simplified view of potential piracy. As you can see the difference was zero for almost 5 days but once the Game of the Day popularity kicked in we can see a massive rise in the difference and for the last two weeks we see a fairly steady discrepancy of around ~55%. The latest data suggest that we have over 100K players, compared to around 66K sales.

Disclaimer: As I mentioned before, this is not to say that we have a guaranteed piracy rate of 55%. One legal purchase could be used on multiple machines (either through multiple devices by one person or through family sharing) but on the flipside, pirated versions could also block our tracking completely so there could be a much larger number of players that we simply don’t see. What is clear though is that piracy exists on iOS and is likely substantial.

It’s much easier to accept the effects of piracy once your product is profitable but I really wonder how the mobile market would look like if piracy of premium games was lower. Perhaps the Top Grossing lists and market direction wouldn’t so heavily favor freemium games?

It will be interesting to see how the Android release will compare. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait long to find out.
Until next time!

– Patrick
Greenheart Games 💚

You can comment on this blog post on our forum, here.

This is part 3 of our Game Dev Tycoon mobile release analysis.

• Part 1: A Rough Start
• Part 2: Steady Improvements
• Part 3: Game of the Day!
• Part 4: Good News

In the last report, we saw a steady increase in sales with day 2 growing by 7% and day 3 by another 11%.

Featured in the US

Day 4 saw us featured in several markets as well as receiving a much-coveted “Game of the Day” feature in the US market. This is our first published game on the App Store but the idea we got from talking to other developers was that a feature in the US is essentially hitting the jackpot. Other than somehow managing to go viral (which we didn’t attempt), this is the best-case scenario for exposure within the App Store.

I should mention that Apple prepares these features well in advance and for new games they ask for at least 6 – 8 weeks lead time so the “Game of the Day” feature was definitely not a reaction to our launch experience but planned ahead of time by Apple. In a later postmortem, we’ll go into more detail of how we tried to make it easy for Apple editors to feature our game but while we were hopeful about a feature we did not know if, when or where such a feature would happen.

Since iOS 11, the “Game of the Day” feature is not just a fancy banner that links directly to your product page but, instead, a multi-page article written about your game that tries to highlight what makes your game special. The Game Dev Tycoon feature is really well written and not only describes the general idea of the game (to run a game studio) but also manages to explain the entire gameplay arch elegantly. Unfortunately there is no web version I could link to but here are some choice excerpts:

To create your first game, pick a platform, topic, and genre, as well as specific elements – like level design, graphics or sound- to focus on.

One-sentence tutorial: Done ✅

Minutes later, your new game has launched (things move fast in this world), and you can see how crucial those decisions really were. Perhaps devoting resources to sound instead of dialogue limited the appeal of your mythological RPG. Or maybe it was choosing to build a rhythm-based adventure that doomed you from the start.

The Apple editor(s) really got Game Dev Tycoon and highlight the thought processes potential players would go through while playing the game.

Salaries, marketing, interviews, cost control. The bigger you are, the busier it gets. But it’s worth it for the thrill of releasing a monster hit that earns 10 out of 10 reviews. Sounds like a great opportunity for a sequel…

The feature ends by highlighting what the progression of the game is and what late-game challenges it provides while also touching on the motivation that makes playing the game so rewarding.

As a developer, I’m used to describing Game Dev Tycoon and I’ve also seen a fair share of reviews of the game but this feature from the Apple editors is one of the best descriptions of what Game Dev Tycoon is about. I simply couldn’t have hoped for a better spotlight.

Our ratings from players in the US were are also very strong. We currently have a rating of 4.9 stars out of 869 reviews.

With all this good news, let’s have a look what effect this had on our sales.

Sales

When the feature kicked in on Day 4 we sold 196% more units than the day before and Day 5 saw another 45% increase. Day 6 saw much the same results but Day 7, our latest data point, shows a -26% drop in sales.

I am not sure if we can share conversion rates and impressions (will check with Apple and, if possible, share it in a future report) but, given the massive exposure the feature had, we hoped for a little more sales as a result. We don’t have data from other games as a comparison so we don’t know if this result is simply because Game Dev Tycoon is serving a niche in a mainstream market or if we made some mistakes on the Store page itself.

Whatever the reason, it is likely both our own fault and simply the market itself; we couldn’t have hoped for a better representation from Apple or our players and thus can’t complain. This feature gave us a much needed boost and put the game in a good spot in the charts which will hopefully guarantee us continued strong sales for a little while longer.

US Charts

We topped the overall US charts at spot number 5 on Day 5 and, despite the nearly 26% drop in sales on Day 7, held that position. Interestingly, we never even got close to the Top 100 or even Top 200 Top Grossing charts, the closest we got was on Day 6 with a ranking of 265. This just highlights again what every mobile developer has always told us: the App Store is dominated by free-to-play games, don’t expect to hit a jackpot with a premium game. Thankfully for us, we didn’t port the game to hit a jackpot and with the new sales data it looks likely that the port will be profitable.

Possible Piracy Rates

In the past reports, we talked about a likely piracy rate of 0%. We are now getting some hints that this might be changing.

This graph compares the total confirmed unit sales (in blue) to the total tracked unique users via analytics (in orange). As you can see the first days the total unit sales where equal or bigger than the tracked users but starting with day 4, this changed and by day 7 we see a dramatic rise in the difference with 12% more players than sales. I don’t know how Unity analytics tracks unique users in detail, so it’s safer to assume that it doesn’t track legal installations on multiple devices or installations through family-sharing (which we support) as one single user. This could explain the difference but even if we can’t make a clear call of what’s piracy and what’s just legal usage, it will be interesting to see how this difference changes over time.

I should also mention that we have seen some activity on the web that suggests that there are illegal copies of the game in circulation. Depending on how these copies are cracked, pirates could potentially not show up in our analytics at all. We might be able to share more data on this in future reports.

Musings about Sales Targets and Taxes

After seven days, Game Dev Tycoon on the App Store has about $110K in proceeds which is nearly 58% of our investment. Unless there is a continued massive drop in sales (we hope not!), it looks very likely that we will make our investment back and if we can sustain our chart positions a while longer, we might make some profit too. 🥂

We will see if we can make enough to justify investing again in such a big premium game. The amount of income that is required for our business to develop a project like this is quite staggering. Current day taxation systems really aren’t ideal for businesses that have most of their profits in a single year but then consistent expenses in the years afterwards. Australia has a company profit tax of 30% which essentially means that, in order to make a game with $190K again, we need to aim for a profit of at least $271K ($271K – 30% = $190K). In other words, if we can’t invest in a new project in the same year that we make our profits in, we need to make 42.8% more money to spend the same amount again ($190 + 42.8% = $271K).

This brings our revenue target to close to half-a-million dollars or 128K full-priced unit sales. On one hand this is an overly cautious calculation because it assumes that we cannot offset any of our future expenses in the year we make the profit, but on the other hand it also assumes that all the initial investment is an expense in the same year you make your money back (which sadly isn’t the case for us). It also doesn’t plan for any kind of margin. If your next game then fails, which is statistically likely, you could still be out of funds and out of business.

Interestingly, this is pretty much the same reason why a lot of Game Dev Tycoon players go bankrupt at least once. They make a hit-game as a small team, make millions and then overstretch by growing too fast and trusting too much that the next game will be an equally big hit. Moments later they cannot pay their staff anymore, the bank comes knocking and Electronic Mass Productions buys their IP.

Thankfully, we have a buffer from the success of the PC version but it’s no wonder indie studios don’t risk their money on expensive premium games much. It seems simply too risky. Hopefully for us, our growth curve will continue to be at least steady a little while longer and, together with the Android release, allow us to reach that goal.

– Patrick
Greenheart Games 💚

You can comment on this post here.

Part 4 of our report, is here.

This is part 2 of our Game Dev Tycoon iOS release analysis.

• Part 1: A Rough Start
• Part 2: Steady Improvements
• Part 3: Game of the Day!
• Part 4: Good News

If you haven’t seen Game Dev Tycoon on the App Store, you can check it out here or simply click on the image below.

It took me nearly a whole day to compile the first report so for the second report we already have data for the next two days after release. We also have some reactions to our first report and some clues of what the next days might hold but first let’s take a look at the data.

Sales

Day 2 and 3 showed a steady increase in numbers. Day 2 unit-sales grew 7% to 1.5K and day 3 saw another 11% increase to 1.7K units.

Piracy rates

Because we did not repeat our piracy experiment (see part 1 for reasons why), we cannot easily observe piracy rates. What we can do is compare our Unity analytics (essentially anonymous statistical data) with our purchase numbers.

Ordinarily I would caution that this is inherently imprecise and becomes more useless with each day as one legal purchase could be (legally) used on multiple devices and even by multiple people (we support family sharing both on Steam and on iOS) but looking at the data I should not have worried.

According to Unity analytics we had 3,572 new players across all three days. This stands against 4,773 sold units during the same period. This suggest a piracy rate of 0% and indicates that 25% of people who purchased the game haven’t had a chance to play it yet.

This is in stark contrast to our experience on PC – Part of the reason we never published Day 2 stats for our piracy experiment was because by the time we looked at the data, there were so many players and so many pirates playing the real game (rather than our joke one) that it was impossible for us to make an insightful call to what the actual piracy rate was – well, other than saying still pretty high. It will be very interesting to see how this will play out in the next weeks and even more insightful to see how the Android release in January will compare.

More analytics

Sadly, our statistics for games created and bankruptcies inside the game have malfunctioned but here are some other fun stats we can share:

5,685 companies were created
3,328 bailouts were taken
1,511 companies reached the last office
1,169 staff were fired

Particularly noteworthy is that 26.5% of players reached the last office. This number is surprisingly high 3 days after release, especially since it takes around 7 to 12 hours to complete the game if you don’t go bankrupt (and most players go bankrupt at least once).

The last analytics number we proudly want to share is the number of in-app purchases sold so far 😁

(spoiler: it will remain at 0!)

Reception

After day 3, 250 players rated the game with an average of 4.8 stars which means our rating is keeping very steady.

Most lower ratings are, as before, due to a problem where the game can stall on iPhone X (not everyone is affected but if you are, please try to logout from Game Center and then in again). – We are deploying a fix for this right now but it still has to pass review.

On the press side, Pocket Gamer gave us a glowing review:

A stunning simulator that’s perfect for mobile – 9/10

Pocketgamer (Ric Cowley)

Chart Rankings

According to App Annie day 2 saw us drop out from the Top 100 charts but thankfully we improved substantially on day 3 reaching the Top 28 in the US.

Interestingly, this volatility is not reflected in our proceeds which is visible if we overlap the charts data with the proceeds from the US market.

Given the relatively small sample size here (we are still just talking about 1-2K units) this might just be natural fluctuation on the App Store but it’ll be interesting to see how closely our proceeds will match our chart position.

Day 1 Report Reactions

I’d like to summarize and respond to some of the reactions we got to our Day 1 Report. First, the reaction from readers was very positive. Twitter in particular showed many tweets where people appreciated us for being so candid. Thanks to everyone who shared the story on Twitter or elsewhere! 💚

Newsletter

We sent out another newsletter last night and I’m happy to say that the open rate was better compared to our announcement post.

The click-rate in particular was more than double. As people pointed out yesterday, our announcement title was self-explanatory and didn’t mention new features so many readers simply marked the email as read once they read the subject.

We also received multiple emails that reported our newsletter landing in Google’s ‘Promotions’ tab which, I suspect, very few people actually read and has been dubbed ‘The Death of Email Marketing’. Yes, our announcement was a promotion and is marketing but it’s a pity that Google would lump our once-a-year important email announcement into the same category as daily sales emails.

Others also reported seeing the newsletter in Spam which also surprised me because our Spam-report rate is very low (0.003% vs. industry standard 0.02%).

In the end I think we just have to accept that an open-rate of 40%+ of yesteryear is no longer feasible and also admit that there is room for improvement. I know our subject lines could be better, it’s a topic I struggle with because I really dislike click-bait subjects myself but there must be a better way to be both informative and interesting.

Budget

In our Day 1 Report we stated that Game Dev Tycoon iOS cost us 190K and a few people reacted to that saying that the budget is way over the top. I should start with saying that we budgeted for 120K, the rest was, well, unexpected but both we and the developers of the port Rarebyte believed that a good performing port needs to be of high quality. The game experience needs to feel right and not just be a function-by-function copy of the PC version.

I think it’s also an easy mistake for developers or designers to severely underestimate the complexities of a different game. Game Dev Tycoon isn’t as small as it may seem. The original PC game has over 30K lines of handwritten code, was developed over 1.5 years and has nearly 20K words which appear in the game. The port by Rarebyte (from HTML5/JS to Unity/C#) took over 3,000 hours over nearly a year to develop. The budget isn’t just development either, it includes marketing and other expenses.

The bottom line is that if you run a game development studio as a business where you pay everyone on the team a fair wage and where your own time isn’t worthless either, then game development is really really expensive and risky. That’s especially true if you then factor in the real amount of cash you need to earn to even get that budget together in the first place but that’s a topic we will explore in a proper post-mortem.

Why not make a new game instead?

The other sentiment that came up was why we even spend effort to port an old game instead of making a new one.
Well, to those who haven’t heard it before, let me introduce Game #2: Tavern Keeper 😉

We are investing heavily into a fantasy tavern simulation game for the PC, you can find out more on our website: https://tavernkeeper.com

The main reason it took us so long to get Game Dev Tycoon for Mobile off the ground was because we didn’t have the human resources to develop both a new game and a port and strategically and creatively a new game seemed more important. We still wanted to do a port simply because so many people asked for it but finding a development partner you can trust takes time, hence the delay in Game Dev Tycoon appearing on mobile.

Are you only marketing to people who own Game Dev Tycoon?

In the first report it seemed like we only used our current fans and reach to market the new release. I didn’t mention it before but we contacted nearly 300 journalists and several influencers during the lead-up of the launch and most of the review coverage is a direct result from that. We also set a review embargo for release day to try to get as many clicks on the App Store page as possible on day one. I think this would have worked fine if not for the link not working. As I also said in the previous report, we would consider a soft launch next time we launch something on the App Store.

To wrap this up, thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion, be it on the forum, on social media and via email! Besides the points I mentioned above, there were many suggestions that made us think and we appreciate all of your input and time. Also thanks to everyone who gave our game a review and who considered other options. This is all really helpful, so thank you! 💚

Outlook

To close off this report, I wanted to give you some insight into live data that we are seeing on Unity analytics today (this data is a bit more up-to-date than our other sources). Unity analytics show that 1.7K units were installed in the last 14 hours, which suggests that day 4 will be our strongest day yet. In addition, App Annie shows us that we are featured in 15 countries on both the iPhone and iPad home page today (yay!) so we can expect an upwards trend. We will report on the results of the next days early next week.

To be notified of further reports, consider signing up to our newsletter (you will be in good company) and perhaps take the time to white-list ‘system@greenheartgames.com’:

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– Patrick
Greenheart Games 💚

You can comment on this post here.
Continue following our story in part 3.

We decided before the release that we would try to share sales data with the public after checking that this is allowed with our contact at Apple. This is in part so that other developers have more data to make decisions on, and also gives us a chance to talk more about the release, instead of only re-sharing positive coverage.

Here’s the data from our release day (one day delayed because of how the data is collected).
(For Android players: Release on Android is scheduled for January!)

After one day

(Release time 28th Nov, 6AM PST.) Data after 24 hours

Piracy

We did not repeat our piracy experiment because I don’t think we are legally allowed to publish an iOS game outside of the App Store, even if it were a joke version. Looking at our data however, and seeing that the actual users are in fact lower than the purchases, suggests that there is a piracy rate of 0%, which would be incredible.

Reception

Players had a great time playing the game. On release day we got 86 ratings with a total rating of 4.8 stars, or as Game Dev Tycoon would say 10, 10, 10, 9 (thanks, All Games 😉). Seriously though, the only visible low rating was due to an issue where the game can crash on iPhone X – fair enough and sorry, we are investigating (if you have that issue, please try to logout of Game Center and then back in again or get in touch with us via email).

The press also gave us great reviews, here is the 5-star review from Toucharcade:

It’s the perfect sort of game for mobile devices and there’s so much to do here […] all players owe it to themselves to check out this great port.

Toucharcade (Eric Ford)

We couldn’t have hoped for a better reception. Thanks players and press! You are amazing 💚

Sale Numbers

1,463 copies in 24 hours is pretty good for a first game on a platform but if you take into account our audience and if we compare this data to other platforms and to the amount of copies we have to sell to break even on the mobile version, it becomes more sobering.

Even on the Windows 8 Store, back in 2011 when we had an audience reach of zero and very few people had Windows 8 (and even fewer wanted to have anything to do with the Store app on it), we sold around 450 copies on day one. Given the massive reach of iOS, the much lower price ($4.99) and given that we (tried) to reach our audience we certainly hoped for a better launch day.

To give another comparison, when the game launched on Steam we sold substantially more on day one.

Visibility

The reason Steam was such a strong release for us was primarily because Steam had us featured on the front page. After the piracy story went viral in early 2012 and we had all the attention of the world (it felt like it anyway) we didn’t actually do the smart business thing and rush the game on Steam but instead disappeared for over three months to polish the game based on feedback we’d received from our players. Quality-wise this was an important decision. Our initial release has a Metacritic rating of 68%, but after the changes we made for the Steam release, we got a 95% user approval rating from Steam players. If Steam hadn’t featured us at launch though, I don’t think we would have reached the critical mass that makes word-of-mouth effective… bringing me to the next point: marketing.

Marketing (or how we failed to reach most of our audience)

We suspected that Apple would not feature us on day one, so we set our goal to try to rally our audience behind the release on launch day to get the first important positive boost. Part of the reason we were confident to invest into a good Game Dev Tycoon port (Rarebyte, our development partner, spent over a year creating the port), was that we have a larger audience than the usual indie game studio.

We have a decent following on Facebook (GreenheartGames 7K, Game Dev Tycoon 13K , TavernKeeper 1.6K) and Twitter (Greenheart Games 8.4K, Tavern Keeper 2.1K) but our real star is our newsletter which has a staggering 145,714 recipients.

What’s more is that the vast majority of these recipients bought Game Dev Tycoon in the past and are simulation game fans. We treat our newsletter with a lot of respect and only use it when we have big news, sometimes going nearly 600 days without sending something as we really don’t want to inconvenience people. This has worked really well for us in the past as the few times we do actually send a newsletter, we reach a open rate of nearly 40% (industry standard: 20.82%).

Our thinking thus was simple: Make a good port that also offers something new and write a straightforward and nicely formatted email bringing people directly to the iOS store.

We sent the newsletter out in time for the US mainland to see. Sadly though, the result over the next 24 hours was underwhelming: an open rate of 13% and a click rate (on the image or link to the App Store) of 2.41% which is both well below the industry standard. This means that on launch day from our 145K-strong newsletter readership, only 3,509 people clicked on the link. I’m not sure what the cause of this low rating was but people live busy lives and we are not entitled to their time! We will simply try to reach our audience again in the next few days.

Unfortunately, for many of those people who did click the link, the link didn’t seem to work and they couldn’t find the game in the App Store.

App Store patience

Apple says that it can take up to 24 hours for the Store to be updated and show new releases. They are not kidding. We sent our newsletter out six hours after the game release (after we had tested the game link extensively among the team and our friends) but even 18 hours after release people were still saying that the link resolved to nothing. Game Dev Tycoon was also not showing up in search results and we were simply not visible in the Store for the clear majority of the day. This was rather stressful and unexpected. We certainly would consider a soft launch next time we release something on the App Store.

Social media

To try to increase our initial reach we ran a thunderclap campaign (thanks for everyone who signed up) and we were happy with the result but should probably have pushed this more and earlier.

Our announcements (Twitter, Facebook) did reasonably well too but the sad fact of the matter is that the followers you have on social media are largely unreachable unless you spend heavily on advertising.

Reaching people on the internet. pic.twitter.com/dneGM14Cyl

— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) October 25, 2017

Reluctantly, spending a bit on advertising is what we tried next, just to give us a first boost and reach our existing followers but both Facebook and Twitter refused to take our money. Facebook apparently doesn’t allow boosting of posts that link to the App Store:

Twitter only allowed me to boost the post in Austria

and then, when I found a specific App Store promotion option, simply refused to accept the link as valid (just as many other users had reported, the link didn’t work for them):

Regardless, we couldn’t afford to invest much in social media boosts anyway. The game is only $4.99 and has no further monetization (no ads, no in-app purchases) and given that Apple still takes a cut, I suspect there is not much point in paying $2+ to get someone to install the game. (We are running a trial on Facebook though, so we’ll see what those results will be next week).

Charts

During the end of the first day, we did show up in Top Paid games’ charts across the world which, given the sales numbers, was surprising. In the US we made spot 42 under Top Paid and in many ‘Strategy’ lists we were in the Top 20.

(source App Annie)

If you are wondering what Rank 42 in Top Paid relates to in Top Grossing category, the answer is apparently Rank 1,560+ which, together with our earnings from our first day, just highlights how steep the Top charts on the App Store fall. I suspect for premium games, if you are not in the Top 30, you are not very profitable (though this is all based on App Annie rather than data from Apple so take it with a grain of salt).

Outlook and Conclusion

Release day is always stressful and exciting at the same time. On one hand you are faced with unexpected technical issues and simply a lot of unknowns, all of which is emotionally draining. On the other hand, you get to see first reactions and wonderful people share their experiences and enjoy the launch with you. As developers, we spend years behind the screen working quietly on our games with almost no input from anyone so it’s really fantastic to then see so much joy from players.

On the business side, we will have to wait and see. The mobile game cost us around 190K USD because, well, the game is much larger than you might think and we really wanted to make a good port. Naturally, we need to sell a lot more copies before this becomes profitable but we are not entitled to profitability, nor success. It’s only the first day and hopefully now that the link works and our game is visible, things will pick up a bit. Meanwhile we are addressing all known issues and hope for a potential feature from Apple (which we are also not entitled to, of course). Our biggest chance to success is, quite simply, you. If you think you could like our game, please check it out:

And if you enjoy the game, leave a positive rating or consider helping in other simple ways 💚.

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Part 2 of our report is here.