One year ago, on November 1st 2016, we released a free Demo build of Where Shadows Slumber to the world. This marketing build has just 10 Levels and a cutscene at the end, yet it’s been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times by gamers all over the globe. We don’t get a chance to talk data often, but this post is dedicated entirely to discussing the performance metrics of our Demo. Towards the end, we’ll answer the burning question on your mind: was it worth it?

Google Play Lifetime Stats

The Demo performed the best on the Google Play store. I have a feeling that’s because the Demo is free, and people on the Google Play store tend to be younger / less willing to pay for games. When they see a free game that looks beautiful, of course they’re going to download it! Let’s dive into the Google Play Console and check out some of our stats…

Installs and Uninstalls

First, the obvious: we’re two no-name developers living in Hoboken, New Jersey and 250,000 PEOPLE DOWNLOADED OUR GAME ON ANDROID!!!

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*Ahem*

The lifetime chart of the Demo on Android shows that it went live in November and hit its peak in December, probably due to the Christmas holiday. I think it’s interesting to note that the first two months an app is live appears to be “prime-time.” Look at all those downloads!

Yet, even though we hit our lowest point (since the November we launched) in May 2017, we’ve consistently gotten more downloads every month after that. Rather than plateau, the app continues to outdo itself month after month. That’s crazy. I’m proud of that, and I hope this month’s downloads eclipse October’s, which is 26, 467. That’s pretty tough to beat!

Of course, the downside is that nearly everyone who installed the app promptly uninstalled it, most likely after completing it. I’m not shocked by that. This is just a demo. People want to play it and then get rid of it – it doesn’t really deserve to stay on their phone. I expect this behavior will continue with the final game, save for a few thousand people who feel sentimental and can’t bring themselves to delete it. I’m pretty ruthless when it comes to clearing space on my phone’s hard drive, so I don’t blame people for not sticking around. You might say our “retention” is terribly low. But I also don’t think it matters for Premium games the same way it does for Free games.

Ratings and Reviews

As you can see in the charts above, our lifetime rating is quite high and we’ve received thousands of ratings. People have responded very positively to the Demo! The majority of our ratings are 5 Stars (4,149) with only a sliver of negative 1 and 2 Star reviews.

The graph of our rating is interesting. Starting with a perfect 5 Star rating at launch, we slowly drip down to a 4.6 (the bottom of the graph is 4.6, not zero!) by May 2017. Then, as indicated, the build adding a finale cutscene goes live. From there, our ratings steadily increase to the point we’re at now.

This is a really important moment in time, because Jack and I were nervous about how the story would be received. It’s a bit off – not quite what you’d expect from a puzzle game made in the image of Monument Valley. We expected more negative reviews. Instead, they’ve been largely positive. We kind of left people on a cliffhanger and they’re eager to find out just what the heck is going on.

At right, you’ll see a common review. Most of them are like this: people love the game, say they’ll buy it, but are disappointed that this is just a Demo. Truly, I have no idea how people missed this! The title of the app is Where Shadows Slumber Demo (Beta). There’s two keywords in that title that would tell you this is not a finished thing! But you can file that under “nothing is too simple for people.”

If you want to read more reviews, go to our Demo’s Google Play app page and flip through them. I could read them all day, but it would make my head get too big.

Who Is Playing?

The top five countries that downloaded our game are South Korea, India, the U.S., France, and Mexico in that order. France and Mexico are nearly tied, and the U.S. isn’t too far ahead of them. But India has double our installs, and South Korea blows everyone out of the water. What the heck is going on?

It’s important to note that Jack and I went through the arduous process of paying for 14 languages of translated text and put them into the Demo. That means Indian players see the game’s app page in Hindi, as well as the in-game text. That’s a big deal. It means we’re meeting people where they are across a global market. We didn’t translate the game into any African languages, so it’s no wonder that entire continent is grey except Egypt. (We did translate the game into Arabic…)

Free games are really popular in Asia. To the extent that this Demo is a “free game,” that explains its success in South Korea and India. After all, it is a game that costs no money. So it is technically a free game! I do not expect this same success once the game costs $0.01 or more. We’re going to have to target the Asian market with a lower price than normal, or perhaps even a try-before-you-buy method where the first half of the game is free. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that these people downloaded our game and clearly loved it. But when the business model flips and we ask for their cash up front, I don’t expect to see South Korea or India to even make it into the top 10 list.

App Store Performance

The App Store’s analytics aren’t quite as easy to decipher as Google Play’s… also, our performance on Google Play dwarfed the App Store in every possible way!

App Units vs. Impressions

Our performance on Apple makes more sense to me. We only “sold” 32,285 app units. We got over 200,000 lifetime impressions, but I don’t know what that means! That may just be when someone sees the game but doesn’t necessarily act upon that.

The chart of our downloads follows a pretty standard “flash-in-the-pan” trajectory. This may be partly because we were never able to upload our language translations to the App Store. I’ll discuss that a bit more when we get to my conclusions, but that’s my guess as to why we plateaued in May and never really rebounded.

It should be stated that App Store customers are the polar opposite of Android people – App Store customers probably want paid games and see “Free” as a mark of low quality. I expect these numbers to swap when the final game is released.

Ratings and Reviews

We didn’t get nearly as many reviews on the App Store – just 26 in one year. That’s probably all an indie developer can expect, but it doesn’t explain the disparity between this and Android. The reviewers were quite kind, and we have a 4.9 out of 5.0. However, with such a small sample size, that’s not as impressive.

Who Is Playing?

Surprisingly, China is our top country on the App Store. I didn’t even know we had access to the Chinese App Store! I don’t know if we can trust those numbers. In second place we have the United States, and then Russia, Japan, and South Korea. These numbers are too small to really tell us anything meaningful, except that we should focus our efforts on China for the iOS release of this game!

Amazon App Store Performance

The Amazon version of our Demo went up earlier this year, but there’s no way to really see how much traffic it has gotten. My guess is that no one besides Jack and I have seen it, since the only review is one that I left on the company account.

If you have a Kindle or a Fire, please check out the Demo there! We’re doing a lot by trying to be on as many platforms as possible, and we could use the testing feedback.

I hope things will be better in the future with Amazon, but this isn’t promising. The company has gifted us four mobile devices to use for testing, as well as a guaranteed spot on the Amazon App Store feature banner at a time of our choosing. Let’s hope they have the install base to make it worth our time! We will not be coming to Windows Phone since those devices have been discontinued – I hope the same fate does not befall Amazon.

Retrospective: Was It Worth It?

After having our Demo available for free all this time, people often ask us “was it worth it?” What’s the point of releasing a demo so far in advance of the actual game? Don’t you want those people to pay for the real version? Won’t they forget about your game by the time it launches? Does anyone even make demos anymore?

That’s true – mobile gamers who stumbled upon our Demo a few months ago probably already forgot about us. They’re not eagerly anticipating the release of the final game. It probably isn’t even on their phone anymore! Just because this game is the center of our world, that doesn’t mean we can expect the same loyalty from some people who played a 15 minute trial. (Shout out to everyone reading this blog, because the previous paragraph clearly does not apply to you!)

It’s fine though, because none of that was ever the intended purpose of the Demo. All we needed were the following things:

A proof of concept that shows we can actually make something great

that shows we can actually make something great Something that claims the name Where Shadows Slumber before anyone else

Where Shadows Slumber before anyone else A quickly deployable version of the game to showcase at events

version of the game to showcase at events An easily submittable build that we can send to judges for contest submissions

build that we can send to judges for contest submissions Something that gives us experience dealing with the App Store and Xcode.

By these metrics, the Demo was a whopping success!

We proved to ourselves and our fans (and shadowy unnamed figures who can’t be named) that we can put together an awesome small indie game. Making something a little larger would take more time, but we already had the talent and the drive.

Judging by a Google search of “Where Shadows Slumber”, no one else has been able to claim that digital territory except for an old song from 2007. We’ve been in Google’s search algorithm for over a year, which can only help us in the long run when people try to find us online.

“The Demo has given us an air of legitimacy that many indie developers never consider when releasing their game into the wild.”

Any time we go to an event and the current build of the game isn’t ready to show real people, we just default to the Demo and it’s no problem! In fact, those events go even smoother than when we try to show off the development build. As for contests, having a no-strings-attached build out in the wild makes online applications a breeze. I’ve already got a folder filled with screenshots, videos, and a recent .APK that I can throw in there. I don’t know how many festivals want to feature our Demo, but at least they’ll remember us when we return next year with a finished game.

The App Store is an odd one. Technically, our Demo shouldn’t even be on there because Apple forbids you from submitting them. We slipped through the cracks five times! I don’t think that’s an endorsement of our talent, but rather an indictment of Apple’s system of judging builds. Perhaps we’re on borrowed time, and they’ll delete it any day now. Who knows? It doesn’t matter – between our Demo and the previously released SkyRunner, we’ll be Xcode pros by the time we jump in there a third time for the final release of Where Shadows Slumber.

In the end, it was definitely worth it to produce our Demo. Yes, it’s maddening to watch our game grow better every day knowing that people’s only conception of it is a year-old marketing build. But it will all be worth it in the end when we get to show the world what we’re working on! The Demo has given us an air of legitimacy that many indie developers never consider when releasing their game into the wild.

In the meantime… (I’ll have to train myself to not say this automatically, because I’m so used to it by now) …download our Demo. It’s free!

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Thanks for reading this long-form business analytics update. If you came here from Reddit, please be kind! You can find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.