Most of us love to play games and at least once we have dreamed about building one. The superhuman world and characters that come to life with our imaginations are limitless in the gaming world. I had my early attempts on building games back in 2013-14 and experienced the potential of this market.

Getting back to the topic, last year we started an indie gaming company, Koco Games and exactly a year ago on November’s first week we released our first game, War Troops. In 2019, mobile gaming is a tough market if you are an indie game developer. The ever-growing CPI of Google Adwords and Facebook makes it tougher for anyone to find even 1000 users. Most of the growth hacking principles don’t work without a budget. Our small team of three didn’t have established web traffic nor brand recognition. So what were we supposed to do next? Wait and pray? No.

Be persistent and iterate faster. This is something I have learned from my past.

Initial downloads come from friends, family and your networks. We kept on improving our game with each update at least once every month. You could see how the game UI, Graphics, UX changed over time from our older APKs (20 versions).

We thoroughly tracked post-install metrics and measured each and every button click, dropout, sessions, and usage. This helped us to improve the game design in each upgrade until a point where users started asking for more content, in-apps, etc. As an indie developer, if you don’t have the Ad budget to experiment you have to live through this phase longer. Being ramen profitable through popup ads will help you survive.

During this phase, you could do many things to help you grow organically faster. These are some of the things we did -

Experiment with the name for Google play search ranking - Our game name “War Troops” stayed as it is, and we tested different combinations of strategy game names in the tail. Finally, we stuck with “Military Strategy Game for Free” which had enough search volume. There are different tools like app Annie to find this volume. If paid tools aren’t affordable for you, a quick hack is to search in google play for different keyword combinations and check the number of downloads for other indie games in the results. And select one that suits you. We were able to rank in the top 5 searches for “Military Strategy Game”, “Military Strategy Free”, “Military Strategy Offline” and many more. This brings hundreds of downloads every day with high retention. In the long run, users acquired through this channel are likely to buy in-app than users acquired by paid ads by about 700%.

ASO - Everybody talks about this and everybody does this. But like SEO, there is no shortcut for App Store Optimisation. Google Play Publisher dashboard gives you enough tools to AB test your assets, make the best use of it. We iterated our content, images, videos, icons more than 15 times and still continues to do it. Some times a small helicopter in your icon can increase your conversion by 20%+. So do the test!

The usual suspects, In-game growth hacks - Add a share and invite option inside the game and integrate it within the gameplay. Promote the users to rate the game once they have shown some progress in-game. These are all old tactics but still works.

Google relies on quality ratings from genuine users to identify your app. This significantly affects your ranking and app store visibility. Keep an eye on your review words cloud using tools like sensor tower, appbrain, etc. You are likely to be suggested in “similar games” sections using these words and your app listing. Do not attempt to violate Google Policies by forcing users to review or by buying reviews.

Increase your LTV and in-app conversions - Creating combo deals, time-specific deals, event-triggered in-app messages can all increase in-app purchase conversions. This will, in turn, increase your visibility in store in different sections including top-grossing charts. Your free game's growth and future depend on the LTV of each user. By improving the game without affecting gameplay will make a significant difference in user retention. The ideal balance between retention and LTV is crucial, and you will have to constantly test this out.

Redesign the gameplay to minimize uninstalls and increase retention - We don’t like uninstalls, so does Google. If your uninstall rates are lower, Google ranks your game higher in the search as the quality of the game is higher. To increase the retention we revisited analytics of each level in-game and if any particular level had more than 10% drop, we would redesign the level to reduce the difficulty. Also if a user retries the same level the third time we reduced the difficulty to facilitate their victory. This can be done through your Firebase remote config or Unity dashboard or by your code itself. You are shooting yourself if you are focusing too much on growth than the product. It’s simple math, if your retention on day two is 30% and you have 1000 downloads every day, you are adding 300 users to your DAU.

Reach out to YouTube Channels - Influencers can make or break your game in minutes. We started reaching out to gaming channels early on itself. We reached out to channels having less than 10k subscribers at first. Once we made significant traction and we were confident with the economics of the game we started reaching out to larger Channels. Some of the YouTubers that review games have millions of followers and getting one review in their channel will bring you thousands of downloads in a day. And there are other small YouTubers who will review your entire gameplay in multiple videos over a period of time and in the long run, they are real gold. Generally, the response rate for reaching out is 5-10%. So be ready to make a long list.

In short, your game speaks for itself and you have to learn from it every day.

TLDR - Build an awesome game with persistence and faster iterations.

The Results?

We grew slowly, but consistently.

By making games that people love your game becomes featured often and this boosts numbers. Currently, we are in the Top 50 in Top Free Strategy Games in more than 30 countries without Ad$.

All others in this category ranking are heavyweights like Supercell, EA with millions in downloads and Ad budgets. We are fortunate enough to share the spot with legendary games like Clash of Clans, Lords Mobile, Boom Beach. The second game that we recently released reached the Top 200 in less than two months as we could apply most of our learnings there faster.

Update: Two of our games are in the Top 50 games now!





How much do we make?

$XXXX/day that the game generates is 100% profit now (-taxes). Top 50 strategy apps would usually get 10000+ daily downloads. Our ARPDAU is $0.07 and the two-day retention rate is 33-35%. These parameters would be enough for a rough calculation I guess!

What’s next?

We will be releasing our third game by the end of this month. We have started experimenting with paid advertisements to find our CPI, CAC, etc so that we can scale faster. Planning to invest back 90% of the revenue into R&D and growth. We will also be updating the existing games to increase Retention, LTV, and ARPDAU.

On a personal note, My dream is to build a game that can compete with the Top 10s in strategy worldwide, as our fourth game. Even though the gaming market and indie game companies are at an early stage in India, this has helped us to grow lean and experiment more. We really appreciate the efforts of ecosystem builders like the Google Play India team, who are enabling the market to catch up with others and build world-class games from India.



