2017-03-17 - Card Crawl

On the 11th of March 2015 we released Card Crawl on the iOS App Store. 5 month later we also brought it to Android via Google Play and to the Amazon App Store via the Underground games system. Since then the game grew quite a lot (in content and players) so i wanted to give a few insights on how the game does 2 years after it’s initial release.

Platforms

Card Crawl is still a mobile exclusive. We haven’t taken any steps yet to bring it to Desktop (or analogue). Even though we’ve gotten many requests i’m still hesitant to bring it to other platforms. This might not be the smartest business decision and i’m sure we could earn some money from it, but i’m also highly skeptical of the hate from the Steam crowd towards mobile ports. I know it’s mostly an issue of communication and maybe does not affect us in a big way but still it might be not smart for me as an established mobile dev to spread out. The problem here is that as a small indie i rather focus on one platform and make the best out of it and establish a fanbase on this platform than to spread my self thin and increase the amount of support i have to give for each new platform artificially. Making games is hard enough and i’m quite confident that i can handle mobile now in a sane way.

Players

Even after 2 years i’m really supprised by the amount of new players coming into the game on a daily base. Especially on Google Play (due to the game beeing free) we’ve seen a steady increase of new players in the second year. Instead of slowly trailing off the game actually got more popular. Note tho that our 2 year numbers are a tiny fraction of what some games pull in a day.

Here are the numbers for Android since the last 6 Month:

Here are the numbers for iOS since the last 6 Month:

Games

Here are a few stats regarding the game modes and the total number of played games. This is also a snapshot of the last 6 month.

Here are the numbers for Android since the last 6 Month:

Here are the numbers for iOS since the last 6 Month:

App Store Conversion

Another interesting chart are the conversion numbers that the App Store analytics tool offers. Here are the stat’s from the last year. The game got about 31.000.000 impressions (this also includes people just looking at the icon somewhere on the store) about 530.000 page impressions (people actually taping on the icon or looking at the game’s page) and about 10.000 units sold. From this we can see that about 1.3% from all people seeing the icon where opening the page and from that about 1.9% have been buy the game.

Revenue

As always here’s the chart you are waiting for. Card Crawl’s total revenue in 2 years is about $145.000 from Apple and Google Play. Another $6000 came from Amazon Underground.

Here you can see how year 1 and 2 did in comparison:

Ratings

Finally here are the ratings on both iOS and Android. We still have solid 4.5 rating which only gets dragged down by a few bad reviews now and then. I also have the feeling the longer the game is out the better the ratings got over time.

Conclusion

The game still does incredibly well for us. Even after 2 years it seems that there is still a high demand for unique niche games like Card Crawl. I think this is our biggest strength in general. We serve a tiny niche that is still big enough to sustain us even though we are nowhere near the top of the charts. Going forward it will be really interesting to see how the launch of Card Thief will affect Card Crawl’s sales. Thanks again for everyone that has supported us over last 2 years with your kind words or your kind cash! We still have some ideas for Card Crawl and would love to work on it again sooooon!

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