Financials

(In this section, I refer to ‘proceeds’, which means ‘revenue’ minus 30% app store share. All financial numbers are presented in US dollars)

In my three month update (May 2018), I predicted based on the trajectory of Meteorfall that the game would be able to hit ~$90,000 USD in proceeds in the first year. Turns out, that prediction was pretty accurate! In it’s first year, Meteorfall received proceeds of $93,547.06 in non-China territories.

Revenue is still much healthier than I expected overall as well. In May, I’d quoted $150-$200 daily proceeds and surprisingly, that’s still pretty true. Taken across Meteorfall’s entirely life, Meteorfall has averaged $256.29 daily. That does include launch week which skews the average a lot, so I also calculated daily proceeds over the past six months and the average was $163.50 daily. That’s a more accurate picture of the long tail revenue of the game.

Meteorfall (Total Proceeds over 1 year). The small inflection in ~December was due to above expected revenue in December, as well as the price increase from $2.99 to $3.99

Despite continuing to do updates for the game, I’m still not convinced that there’s a strong correlation between doing free updates and increased revenue — but it’s hard to say for sure. The daily revenue of Meteorfall hasn’t increased above ~$160/day in spite of all the additional content added, though it hasn’t decreased either. I would like to add paid DLC in the future as an experiment, possibly a new hero and dozens of new cards, just to see what type of effect that would have on the bottom line.

Regardless of whether updates have increased the bottom line or not, I’ve definitely had fun doing them, and I think it’s helped to build a healthy community around the game. The Meteorfall subreddit is at nearly 500 subscribers which — by Reddit standards — is small, but still really satisfying in my book. There’s been a lot of great strategy and discussion about the game, and I don’t think the game would’ve had such a community without the additional updates.

Additionally, because I’m working on future games that take place in the Meteorfall universe, there is some work that is reusable in terms of character development and other conceptualization. I kind of consider the updates to also be an R&D & marketing cost for future Meteorfall projects.