I'm co-founder of MinoMonsters. We launched our game on iOS but spent a lot of time prototyping on the Android market. Our android prototype has 250k+ downloads and 2k+ reviews. Here's some steps you can take today to try to move the needle.
* Test your screenshots! Assume that 50% of the people in the market will never read your description. Right now, your screenshots communicate "Samurai game". Try a different direction, maybe one more Sudoku focused.[1] Test lots.
* Test your app icon. Test lots.
* You should have a purchase already. Review your monetization strategy. Most developers err on the side of under-monetizing their game, in the hopes that they won't "make players mad" or some other nonsense. Spoiler alert: you're wrong. Start your re-education here: http://www.edery.org/2012/08/your-first-f2p-game-where-you-w...
* Doing games is hard and a lot of what works in games is non-obvious. Be very skeptical of advice you get from anyone that hasn't done games.
* There is only one "tried and true" marketing channel - getting featured on the platform. Outside of that, you need to hustle hard to get your app featured in other places. You've reached out to "a few" sites and forums. Expand your reach to 10x as many sites and forums. Point to your past reviews as social proof for potential future reviews. No one site is going to bring in all the downloads - it's about building buzz and the snowball effect.
I shall repeat: It is very very very hard.
We were featured on CNET, AllThingsD, Kotoku, 148Apps and even reviewed on TV.
Result: You get a nice bump in downloads for a couple of days then it drops back down.
The best thing I have learnt is your budget should be at LEAST 50/50 between marketing and development. If you spent 3 months making the game with 2 developers then your marketing budget should be in the tens of thousands if you really plan on getting anywhere.
Simply having and spending the money won't get you good results though. It needs to be spent really wisely with a lot of thought placed into metrics and analytics. You need to have them in the game. You need to test screenshots/icons/descriptions. Simple change of screenshots helped us get 25%+ more downloads a day.
There is a lot of info out there but it is a huge uphill battle right now. If you take a look at some app review web sites you'll notice every single day there are well over 20 very well polished games being released on iOS and Android. That is every single day. Most don't get anywhere.
I've had some modest success with my own iOS apps but I think that's mainly because they're targeted at a more specific niche (music making) and I've been able to do my own grassroots marketing on forums etc where I know the audience really well and there's far less competition overall.
Games are such a big, saturated market that I wouldn't even consider trying to tackle them as an indie unless I could find a similarly specialized sub-niche.
I believe the apps market, especially games, is and will become even more like the chart music industry. It will settle into major 'labels' who will pick games on criteria they think will make it a success, and then apply their big guns on promoting it using ever evolving methods. Sometimes an indie production will slip through but as the methods mature so will the independent successes be increasingly niche bound.
One quick question here - I notice that you don't mention that press in your app description or homepage?
As a marketing type, any time we get press my first instinct is to say "quick, stick their logo on the homepage! Social proof!". But I'm not a games guy - is there a reason that doesn't work in games?
Regarding getting featured, this is another thing one can aim for. The Android team has written about how to be in the running for getting featured, as have others.
For example - Android introduces new features with new OS releases. In Gingerbread, Android introduced NFC. A well-designed app implementing NFC in an interesting way back when it was introduced had a very good chance of being featured, as well as a chance of getting publicity, and also usage by people who wanted to test their phones NFC capability. Of course, you want to be viable even if you are not featured, but some apps have a better chance of being featured than others, and being featured helps a lot, especially for a paid app.
Being featured can be called the "Holly Grail" on both ios and android.
But I always wondered how the review team of android pick the app that get featured? I am asking this because there is no any review process and wondering what are the opportunities a developer got to get his creation in front of the android review team.
is there any way to test your icon other than to change it once per week and see if downloads change (meanwhile hoping nothing else changes to confuse the data)?
That sounds like an excellent approach that should work well - similar to how Tim Ferriss named "Four Hour Work Week". (Not a games guy here, but I am an ad/marketing guy in one of my hats)
Do run your ads to statistical significance, though!
Just make a dozen variations, break into groups of three, put each set on it's webpage with a header question "Which sudoko game would you rather play?" Install click tracking via your tool of choice GA/Optimizely/VWO/CrazyEgg/Clicktale. Then head on over to either mechanical turk, usertesting, gorillatesting, or one of the other many services out there. Target your expected demographic and pay for a 5-20 individuals (or whatever volume of people will make you comfortable) to go through each set clicking the one they'd want to play. Take the winner from each set, create a new page with the three winners, select a new group of testers. Take the winner and make it the first one you go with. Then over time you can try switching some in and out of the actual app store. But increase the chances that your first one is your best!
The OP here.
I think this is becoming a big incentive for developers. We also have the IOS version almost ready, but we chose to launch it on android first to be able to do quick iterations.
For example, we already pushed more than 4 version in 3 weeks to adjust to users requests.
The highest order bit is cash flowing to developers, unfortunately. If Android matched iOS in credit card coverage and user's propensity to pay the platforms would be way more competitive than they are currently.
Android definitely has a lot of catching up to do there.
But it also seems to me that the entire app market is shifting more to apps that aren't revenue sources in themselves but free apps that are part of some larger business strategy and in that world overall user reach is what counts. And there Android has all the momentum.
I think we're going to hit an inflection point later this year when 4.x breaks 50% market share and more developers start feeling comfortable ignoring the 2.3 laggards.
Besides that, great points. Marketing takes a lot of A/B testing. I have to say, I like the graphics and whole idea behind Empire of Sudoku. The screenshot does indeed scream samurai more than sudoku, as mentioned by teej.
DO you think that plays against us?
The idea was to make sudoku FUN once again, by having challenges, "fight with friend". You see... making it different and enjoyable with everyone, even those who don't usually play it.
You're going after the wrong target market. Sudoku apps are for middle aged women (Yes, I generalize, but it's pretty much the only game my mother plays on her Android phone).
Stop targeting your ads at Android related users (Android forums, games review sites). Go find a place where the people who will actually play your game hang out and then advertise there. Mothers group forums, parenting forums, business traveler hangouts, school teachers - whatever.
I agree with peak Sudoku. I search for Sudoku on Google Play and get 1000 responses. That is a search limit, who knows how many Sudokus there are. Someone starting out with Android might want to go for something a little more niche that has potential demand at first.
Also, the app is only in English as far as I can see. So they are competing in the most crowded market. Not that foreign languages save you with competition always. I tried to do an Android app in another crowded market, flashlight apps. Doing it in several languages did not help.
There are so many lacunae on Android, I have ideas all the time, yet so many people do yet another Sudoku app. They said they spent a lot of time on it. An MVP would have quickly told them what the demand was.
In terms of lacunae - only one app handles Microsoft Access files on an Android device AFAIK - my app. I based it off a popular LGPL Java library, the MVP took about two days or so of work, and did very little. I got a response, and suggestions, and built it up a little. I only have one competitor that I know of, and their database works off-device, and charges a fee after a trial period. There are gaps all over like that yet everyone goes for another Sudoku app, another flashlight app etc.
> We may have reached Peak Sudoku on mobile devices.
That's a nice and clever way of saying what I intended to say.
Absolutely no one is sitting around saying, "man, I want to play Sudoku on my phone but I can't find any games!". There's so much Sudoku to choose from, anyone that has wanted a Sudoku game has at least one on their phone, and has probably tried multiple ones before settling on that one.
Is this honestly the Sudoku game to end all Sudoku games? If so, great, but it's going to take a lot of effort to get people to recognize it, as it's no doubt buried in the search results, and game reviewers are not going to be jumping out of their seat over seeing a new Sudoku game hit their inbox. And if it's not the be-all end-all Sudoku, then forget it.
The OP here
Yes, the Game is indeed free, but only with basic feature to get excited about the app. Then the user should upgrade to get access to the other cities and unlock level.
The real issue is not only the big 0 income, but the fact that after 3 week we barely pass the 100 downloads.
Google advertise everywhere that there are more than 1M new android activations everyday.... Those are potential users of any game right.
What is not quite right I believe is the discovery of new app on the market. It took us 13 days to start appearing on the 20th page of the search "sudoku".
So your app that just got released and has 100 downloads should appear before an app that has been out for a longer period of time and has more downloads? I don't really think this makes sense from a user perspective, maybe fiddling with the search results once or twice to show recent apps, but it doesn't make sense to permanently move an app like yours up the list. Sorry if this comes off as harsh.
Fair enough @xshoppyx
I don't mean that a recent app should appear before others. But at least give opportunity to "users" (not apps) to discover alternatives to the apps they have been using or games they've been playing.
For example, on IOS, when you launch your app, you have a section where only the newest apps appear, at that give them enough exposure to sufficient traction if they worth it.
I disagree. Yes there are a lot of Sudoku apps out there but most of them are ugly. I bought the only one that I think has a decent design. And I would probably buy one that came out with really nice graphics and nice ux.
You'll need more than pretty graphics to convince people to try yet another sodoku app.
Yes, those pretty graphics are important, and people getting their first sodoku game on the phone may switch to your game because of them. But almost everybody that likes sodoku already has one installed, and they still have to find you at their search results.
Maybe try making a game there isn't already 50 million ways to play it.
Sorry, but Really!? You expect a game that is also in every single newspaper in the world and has a puzzle book on every single book selling stand to do really really well because why? You launched it and sent it to a few app review sites? That's not all it takes to advertise something, there has to be a reason for someone to choose your game over the 50,000 other Sudoku games. And looking at it, there really isn't.
While I enjoy Sudoku, the overhead of entering numbers is challenging on a phone. I've liked none of the ones I've used, and so far the best Sudoku interface I've used is the one that was stock on my Nook Color.
Even with that, I find still I often find it refreshing to do on paper, as there's less interface annoyance in most cases.
I haven't touched a sudoku in a few years, but I went through a phase where it was interesting.
I developed a system with dots and sometimes little numbers (I think? I don't even quite remember it now) to track the possibilities that worked really well -- I could do advanced puzzles in pen, without ever guessing and being forced to backtrack.
Sudoku online was broken for me, though, because I couldn't use my method.
Pen/paper is a great interface for Sudoku -- very fast and flexible. Are there actually virtual interfaces that beat it, or is the only advantage portability (I'd have my phone at the doctor's office, but I'd probably forgot to bring a Sudoku book)?
I watched the video for this app -- is there support for any method of tracking number possibilities in a given square, or is the only option "make a reasonable guess and see if your score goes up or down"?
The latter is all I saw, and that's a horrible way to do Sudoku, no matter how pretty the graphics are.
It's interesting as a logic puzzle, not as a guessing game.
Most Sudoku apps I've used in the past had a notes system like the one you described. It's not that unusual of a system, I think it's a fairly normal way of doing things.
This is the perfect example of a why many devs here on HN need to stop undervaluing the benefits of a non-technical co-founder that can seriously rock the marketing side of stuff.
What I see here is a pretty good looking app. Sure, it lacks things like scratch marks, but a solid version 1.0. However, you have really not done very much to promote the app. Emailing press and posting on forums won't get you far. The press get hundreds of review pitches a day - you can't expect to email them out of the blue on launch day and get them to cover your app - especially when it is not exactly noteworthy (it's not the first app of its kind).
Learn to hustle. The newspaper ad under the sudoku puzzle was a good idea.
I think there's a more fundamental problem here: entering a market where there are already literally 1000s of other competitors. It doesn't really matter how much he promotes his app - the people who like to play Sudoku probably already have a Sudoku app installed. And there're limited ways to be "better" than existing entrants.
Perhaps a non-technical cofounder could've helped here, but really what he needed is courage and the ability to take risks. People who strike it big - in any market - do so by providing what other people are not providing; you have to be willing to say "I'm going to do what other people are not doing, because they're doing it wrong" and then be right about that.
First, I have a non technical co-funder and he's doing a lot of stuffs to get us traction.
I am not playing it defensive here. I've explained in a previous blog post where the game come from. I admit it should have been out a few months ago already. Nevertheless, what I tried to express in the blog post is my surprise/disappointment the results we are getting from our strategy.
For example of getting featured on two facebook page of more that 200k fans each and not get at least 1k download is still interrogating me.
And to come to the point of "providing what others are not providing", this is the whole point of the app. Our premises were:
- Sudoku can be fun.
- Sudoku can have nice design too with nice ambient sounds.
- You can build a fully featured sudoku game with all the above extras.
The market is telling you that there's no need for another Sudoku game. It's possible that this is because of some missing element in the game design - or it's possible that other people already find the other 1000 alternatives fun, or think they have nice design. Either way, though, wouldn't it be easier to find a less crowded niche where people have real needs that are being poorly met by the existing apps?
I don't think so. I don't want to disclose here the concerned pages. But It is pages of android device manufacturing company. I don't think those kind of company need to buy fans.
I wouldn't expect the majority of those likes to be people who like your type of game, out of 200,000 how many like sudoku? Of of that smaller number how many would want to play it on their phone? Who don't already have an app they like with historical data/saves already?
From 200k your potential target audience drops rapidly I would imagine.
Instead of being featured on device pages you should try and get featured on actual sukoku or puzzle pages where a greater percentage of likes are from people who are more likey to be interested in your product.
"People who strike it big - in any market - do so by providing what other people are not providing; you have to be willing to say "I'm going to do what other people are not doing, because they're doing it wrong" and then be right about that."
That is a seriously good way to talk about indie/startup business.
I was going to say the same thing. Marketing and awareness are not easy, and they are especially not easy when the market you are in is full of people trying to be heard. Good marketing can get your message heard above all the noise.
Right now this app can't be found above the noise floor. So how much is it worth to you, as a developer, to actually have people buy your product. 10%? 20% ? 50% of your interest.
Now for the OP (not sure if they are reading here or not) but the advice to hit up folks who would use your app and where they hang out is a good one. If there is a shopping center or other area where a large number of people congregate near you, consider setting up a table and offering a free App for feedback. In the best case you can tie analytics for app use back to user 'type' (age/gender/socio-economic status/interests) which will let you find other people who might like your app more easily.
The Op here
We have many things we are doing locally to get traction and most of all feedback. And we are also keeping track of analytics.
We've printed ads that we'll be distributing in schools and mall to get some downloads and helpful feedback.
I'd love a non-technical co-founder, if I could only find one. Most business-oriented people I meet like being employed. The only people I meet that are interested in startups (interested in building one, rather than having built one, successfully) are engineers with less panache for sales than I have.
I'm in a similar situation as the OP, and to be honest I'd be willing to give a lot away to have someone handle the sales & marketing end.
Well here's some advice: since you've written an article about your game, link the name of your game to the app store or a review or something. Also, mention that it is free since it is free. And explain what the game is and why anyone should care. In other words, you are always advertising and the biggest mistake people make is to not remove the roadblocks from all the roads. Marketing is easier when you realize, by default, no one cares. Not in a rude way, but no one will put in effort to care about something for no reason. Give them a reason.
If your game is a cool evolution of Sudoku, then focus your initial marketing efforts on places where people discuss that game.
Find where your customers are, then spend your time and effort there. Go to those specific forum boards/google groups and be helpful and cool. Don't just barge in and spam everyone with new topics. Help people out first. Ask senior members to review your game and give you direct feedback. Take their concerns/comments seriously.
Trying to market to everyone simply dilutes your effort.
Make sure you have a good keyword rich domain name like sudoku-pro.com or sudoku-evolved.com or something (I have no idea if those names are taken). Highlight how your product stands out from "generic" soduku games.
Setup a simple landing page (e.g. from a wordpress app template) with more information that details how great your game is specifically for Sudoku fans.
Add google analytics or kissmetrics to the landing page.
List your landing page in google for indexing (be patient it takes a while).
Then buy a little traffic on adwords when people search for the keyword Sudoku (like 50-100 clicks). Limit your budget at first. I'm not suggesting you spend a lot. Just a little.
Check google analytics to see the keywords that showed up on your page. When people click on an adwords ad, it shows the keywords they searched google for.
So, if someone clicks your ad for "Bacon-flavored Sudoku", you will
see in your logs their search term of "delicious tasting sudoku"
You can learn a lot about what people are looking for this way and then fine tune your messaging and even your product to fit what people are looking for.
You released a free app in a crowded market. You are going to need something exceptional to stand out.
Searching for "sudoku" in the Play store returns "at least 1000 results" for Android apps. Potential buyers are unlikely to discover yours on its merit alone even if it is the best in the field.
Review sites are unlikely to want to review "yet another sudoku app". Your 1000+ competitors are all asking for reviews as well. Unless you can offer a compelling narrative or give them an interesting reason to write about this app in particular you should not be surprised that there seems to be little interest.
Your app also requires significantly more permissions than some of the other most popular sudoku apps. I don't know if most users care but given a choice between several free sudoku apps that might make a difference.
Do take it with a grain of salt. I develop for Android, but mostly as a contractor for other people. I can tell you what would worry me as a user, but it's the guys up the thread who have had success selling their own apps that you really want to listen to.
I totally feel your pain. It seems a very well done game.
Unfortunately there are already hundreds of sudoku games, so a user will hardly find i.
I can give you a couple suggestions anyway: send it to the guys over androidpolice.com every 3 weeks they make a list of the best games that just came out like this one http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/15/40-best-new-android-... so I think you might have good chances of getting in there more than a fully featured article.
Post it here. I think HN is more than willing to review your game.
Post it on reddit.com/r/android it's a very open community and they often try apps for people that ask nicely.
Go buy an ad in the Newspaper right under the Sudoku puzzle.
So many freemium models invest hundreds of man hours into development then expect to pay $0 for advertising. It doesn't work like that. If you invested 100's of hours into dev, then get ready to spend 1000's of hours marketing, or alternatively buy your way into the market which is expensive.
Curious what your 'freemium' strategy is for this app. Crafting a strong freemium strategy seems to be a very difficult task which is probably why many companies struggle to find that perfect balance.
Rocketcat games had a huge problem selling their game "Punch Quest", which was stunning due to that game's high quality. They ultimately realized that the money drops were too generous, that links to buy stuff were lost in the UI, that not enough compelling upgrades existed, etc. What you have built seems to be very polished and I think it's a very interesting take on the genre, but I think you might be in similar territory here.
I'd also guess that the lion's share of people that pay for sudoku games are not the type that would want RPG elements mixed in. They are probably an older demographic that values simplicity over everything else. When the game "10,000,000" integrated rpg elements with "match 3" style gameplay, the masses loved it because it was a convergence of two types of gameplays that had similar demographics.
Not all the feature are free, there is in app purchases to unlock levels and cities. It also allows the user to take notes while playing and use hints (only for paying users).
On top of ALL the comments here, which all have very valid points - even if you had a brand-new, innovative game concept, it's still damn hard to get traction and visibility in the app store(s). Nobody knows why this game is so good or that he needs to have it, and for some of those games, it's really a shame. The situation is comparable to web sites a few years ago. There's basically the SEO way - sideline promotion, forums, reviews, people skills etc. and there's the SEM way. If you invest enough to push your way up in the store through advertising (Trademob, the company that I'm working for, estimates around 10-100k, depending on category and target market), you'll eventually be paid back through the resulting organic installations coming from the visibility once you get into the top charts. TL;DR: In 2013, even for killer apps, there's no way to the top except through the hardship of promotion on all possible channels. Viral campaigns, PR, spreading the word, posting, blogging, and often pure money investment as well.
Like others, I would have to point to the choice of making another sudoku as a critical flaw. When a game is the same game as every other, it gets very little buzz or word of mouth...unless it has some overwhelmingly strong new feature to add value.
Content items like art, storytelling, quantity of levels and pre-scripted events are mostly reflective of how video game development budgets tend to be proportioned against marketing budgets, where as the marketing budget gets bigger, more money is spent on making a lavish production that slightly outclasses the competition. These things help when a game has an existing audience that needs to mature into a more elaborate experience, but they have strongly diminishing returns on investment.
Software features like multi-player, solvers, hints and tutorials, puzzle generators, are all good incremental extensions that can get people's attention, and many of these features are relatively cheap compared to additional content. Unfortunately, all of the big, obvious features for incrementally extending sudoku have been covered - there's no chance of gaining a lot of new users in this market when it's so thoroughly saturated.
Monetization has also been saturated. Game monetization follows a pattern typical to innovative technology: Innovators can go pay-to-play if they're selling the privilege of a new experience. A good number of niche games can slip under the radar, making good profits for the innovator, but not enough to get attention. If the game is so profitable that it attracts a lot of attention, clones will appear and add incremental improvements, which pressures both price and quality. Eventually price collapses as free-to-play versions appear. However, free-to-play is _not_ the last step - open-source is. When people are hacking together polished, open-source versions of the game design, it's usually well past profitability, and sudoku is definitely in this category. (Exceptions to open-source as the last step exist, but are mostly related to the relative costs of content vs. technology)
Which leaves you with "create a new, sudoku-inspired game design." Game design is the underlying source of both profitability and popularity in the videogaming sector, but it means having design skills in addition to production skills - formulaic processes for making original, marketable designs don't exist. The vast majority of people in the sector understand either original(but unmarketable) or marketable(but unoriginal), but have trouble recognizing when a design decision and a marketing decision are related, and what the implications are. And since maximizing marketability is more likely to keep you in business, industry consensus always biases around it.
This is what's wrong with your game:
- It's on Android. In my experience Android apps don't monetize as well as iOS.
- It's Sudoko. There are a lot of Sudoku apps out there.
- It's free. You probably need to change the pricing model.
Try soem of the suggestions given in the comments above and let us know what happens.
Hi. I play a lot sudoku and I will not try your app. All the fancy you added to the sudoku game may be interesting, but the first thing I noticed is that your sudoku game is not ergonomic: on a touch screen, you MUST make the grid as big as possible. Personally, I use a sudoku game where I can put remaining possible digits in cases. If the purpose of your game was to improve my sudoku level, there would me more than 4 levels. I do not know who are your clients. I think that if I had a good free sudoku game (better than the one I am using), I would accept to pay (not too much) to have one more feature: the possibility to play a photographed grid.
One of the things you're doing wrong is that social sharing bar which, besides bring completely tactless, overlaps the content on mobile devices such that reading the article is impossible—even when scrolling due to it being fixed.
This game is in the pipeline since a few month now (I made few mistakes by not being lean) but I wanted before the end of the year get it out and see how it's really look like to be out there in the wild. And YES it is out, and I'm not feeling like throwing it, so I need to see what I can make out of it.
There are very good piece of advice bellow though.
Mamadou,
Just curious, are you going to continue to refine Empire of Sudoku, or are you going to move on to other apps, like LiberTweet or perhaps other ideas?
:-) We'll keep refining the app based on the feedback we get from users.
Currently working on a few stuffs like LiberTweet, but those don't affect my commitment to Sudoku Empire. The multiplayer edition is already ready, but we don't want to push it out yet because it could be confusing for user to grasp the game. We want to release it, when we will have enough user, and when those users will get confort using the single player edition.
I agree with the commenters that there is just too much competition for Sudoku apps. I don't think the game I have on the android market https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moore1474.... is nearly as polished as yours, but it gets a couple hundereds installations a day with little marketing from me, because there aren't very many games like it on the market.
I agree on your premise, but think you got the os completely wrong. Why would iOS be any different for them? If they developed it for blackberry or Windows he would have had much less competition and may have found success.
I've been trying to get off the ground with a few Android apps myself [1]. A few suggestions:
1. As others have noted, test screenshots and icon. People looking for a sudoku app probably want to see a board playing sudoku.
2. SEO. There aren't keywords on Android like there are on iPhone so everything goes on the description. I think you might be better off with a bit longer description with more keywords.
3. Keep working on outside promotion. You picked a really crowded niche. When I search for Sudoku on the play store it tells me there are over 1k results. That is not going to be an easy thing to crack so you really need to get an outside feature and get word of mouth working for you. The multiplayer aspect should help with that.
4. Look at more aggressive monetization strategies. I haven't tested it yet (my device is currently dead and charging), but it sounds (and from the screenshots looks) like you might be being too passive. You have to ask people for their money before they will give it to you. Don't give away too much of the game and make it obvious how to upgrade. You have to provide lots of value or they won't want to obviously, but you can't give away so much that people think the free version is "good enough"
When I go to your app’s page, these are the things I see (in order): 1.) smiling samurai on top, 2.) a bunch of menu pages in the screen shots + 1 sudoku puzzle, 3.) a description that’s more tell than show - “the most outstanding sudoku app”. The problem is, I have no idea what makes your game so special. You have about 3 seconds to grab someone’s attention before they hit the back button. I don’t see anything here that differentiates this from other sudoku apps in a meaningful way.
As an answer to the actual title of the article, yes, it is hard. It can't be any other way.
The answer to the question here: there could be many reasons for this. The one that stands out is the fact that the market is very crowded and thus, to get traction in the early days, you need a lot of marketing. The method you have adopted (blogs, forums, videos, etc.) sound like a good start.
To make money — and since the app is free, I presume you are looking at ads — you will need traffic. That traffic isn't going to come in a month; it may not come at all. It seems you've had high expectations and are disappointed at not meeting them. So, yes, here are some of the things you did or are doing wrong:
* the market and the offer (as a combination, not separate) — A crowded market and a me-too offering. There has to be something distinct, something that makes you stand out in a market as crowded as this.
* the marketing itself — You need to be a lot more aggressive in marketing, get your app out on a lot more places. Even if a few blogs aren't publishing as quick as you'd like — and there's a reason for that — be persistent. With this kind of an app, it will be difficult. But not impossible. Get traffic in as many ways as you can.
In some ways, as far as the traffic is concerned, you are also limiting yourself. Why advertise on just game related forums? You can go anywhere you think there is a good percentage of Android users and post. Build some reputation and you will drive some traffic. Again, the key is to be persistent. You may not meet your expectations but the traffic will go up.
Great job on getting something out there! You have made some mistakes, and set some really high expectations, but you have something that you can learn from, if nothing else.
As others have mentioned, Sudoku is a rather crowded market.
Still, your take on it looked interesting so I clicked over to the Play store intending to install it. I then saw that your app wants the "phone status and identity" privilege, which is an automatic no-go for me. Perhaps your potential customers do not want you to know what their phone number is, or the phone numbers of the people they're calling?
These are some thoughts and ideas from the launch for "Tommy Teaches the Alphabet" (www.tommyteaches.com)
1- I knew that this was a crowded segment and had no illusions as to the high probability for failure. In fact, my assumption was that I would have to almost personally make every single sale until other aspects of the "plan" could start to generate them.
2- I also assumed that the app would not do well by itself and would require a family of related apps that could cross-market themselves.
3- The app was built with an SMS-based recommendation mechanism from the very start. In fact, the code is there to extend this to email and social, but I wanted to see if SMS would work well first. Testing is important.
4- Enhanced cross-marketing would be turned on as new apps are released in order to make parents aware of the expanded line-up.
5- The current thinking is that half the apps are going to be absolutely free. The working hypothesis being that they will drive traffic to paid apps.
6- Being that the target users are small kids you really can't have advertising and in-app purchases. Including these things can have viscerally negative reactions from parents. Probably not a good idea. Apps geared towards adults have huge advantages in this department.
7- Given the expectation of having to exist in an already crowded segment I also put forth another working hypothesis for the problem of getting eyeballs to the app. The idea is that, in some ways, it is far easier to market and test (A/B testing) on the Web than on the App Store. Therefore, a companion website was, so the idea goes, of crucial importance. The primary goal of the website being that of a conduit to the various app stores.
8- These days you have to consider strategies beyond iOS. That's why I said "various app stores". The website could also vector traffic to other platform's stores.
9- Website traffic would mostly consist of adults looking for learning tools for their kids. Here's an opportunity to also potentially generate revenue with other branded items and/or affiliate revenue.
10- A website for an app like this can also become a destination in and of itself. Porting these games so that kids can also play them online could be a great way to sell them on mobile devices. Parents might see their kids enjoy them online and want to have time natively on their devices for when they are out of the house. The jury is still out on this idea.
11- Once a few more apps are out I plan on issuing press releases and generally making the product far more visible to relevant sites and reviewers. My thinking here is that doing so with one app might not be the best investment of time and money right now. Multiple apps means more hooks in the water. Therefore, the probability for conversion might be greater.
12- Having one slow-growing app in the market is good in that it will help you identify issues and usage patterns with the app that you are never going to see in your own testing. I've already integrated user feedback and bug fixes into this one app that would have been a disaster to deal with in the case of having tens of thousands of downloads.
13- Analytics are important. Without this data you are blind. I understand my app's usage patterns far better today than I did in the few weeks that it has been out. This tells you where you might want to focus.
14- As I said above, being the my assumption is that I'll have to sell every single copy myself, I have acted accordingly. For example, I took one of my kids to get a haircut the other day. A woman was there with her little girl. They had an iPad. I handed her my phone with the app running and ONLY asked for her opinion. I left them alone and said absolutely nothing. When I got back from my kid getting his haircut she told me that she bought the app and had some interesting feedback. The moral to that story is: Get out there and show your app to everyone that might be in your target market. And, yes, while you are trying to sell, the most important thing you want out of the interaction is to understand why someone might NOT want to buy it so you can improve things.
15- Don't expect overnight success. It could take a year to get to the point where you consider the effort worthwhile. If you are not OK with that then don't jump into the mobile app market. Very few apps become overnight money makers without a significant (read: expensive) marketing push from every angle).
16- Don't give up.
I have hopes for the web+app model. The website has thousands of visitors per day due to my efforts. And the site isn't even finished or optimized in any way yet. I don't have solid conversion numbers yet, but I think that, with time, it could be a good driver. It'll be interesting to learn if the apps and brand can become more powerful as a web property than a mobile app. In other words, an inversion of sorts: start with a mobile app and discover that there's more money to be made on the web. Good question.
Sudoku is probably just as tough, if not tougher, than the children's segment. Get creative.
We run www.slidedb.com which is a developer driven website for mobile games. Whilst our site is only new so the installs we drive will be small, it is one more outlet for you to promote your game (add it here www.slidedb.com/games/add). And because all content shown (including the homepage) is posted by the community / developers - you are not hoping an editor decides to cover your game, any coverage you get is entirely dictated by the effort you put in and what you post.
We have been running simarly themed sites ModDB and IndieDB for years now reaching over 200k+ visitors daily. We hope to bring the same independent developer driven coverage to the mobile space in time.
It's a great looking app - you definitely have a sense for design. However, like many others have already mentioned, Sudoku is overdone.
While you may still gain some traction here (14 5-star reviews is a good start!), you definitely have some talent to use on your next project.
If you go for another game, try to come up with an entirely new gameplay-type. Or at least pretend it's a new gameplay type by not using the gameplay type as part of the game's title. Halo isn't called Halo: First Person Shooter for a good reason.
You made a game. Youre competing with every other game and other forms of entertainment. Id say regroup and refocus on writing software that solves pain points. Read patio11.
I think this is the larger factor. Getting people to pay for Sudoku seems like a big ask considering the plethora of existing apps which scratch the same itch (and better) for free. Graphics aren't a big thing for Sudoku to me.
1) Congratulations on shipping. That's more than a lot of people do.
2) There are too many Sudoku games out there. The product is fundamentally flawed.
3) Cross-promote. You need to somehow get a friendly slightly bigger player to put a link in their game to your game, and visa versa. The difficulty is that you can't really supply clicks. So, play on their sympathies? Indie dev, hometown dudes, etc?
Just downloaded and gave it a minute. Mute doesn't work. Reproduce: start app, hit mute, start game, and this tremendous gong noise rings out when the round starts. Would uninstall right there.
Also, on the Play Store, it's "Empire Of Sudoku - Single", while in my app list, it's "Sudoku Empire". I had to look for it after installing it.
Spend some budget on marketing. Or find free distribution channels. What worked best for me was to create a channel on Playboard (http://playboard.me) and add my app. Or just ask one of the more popular editors to add it to their channels.
I don't install apps that have a banner that says 'FREE' in their logo. I always suspect these games to be of very low quality (I have no clue if that's true of your app as well) and that they are packed with micro transactions.
This is how I see it from my user's point of view.
I see that you are getting it posted on Facebook pages and G+. Why not give it its own facebook promotional page? Ask all of your friends to like it, use bufferapp, etc.
I have 3 sudoku apps on my phone; I can tell you what you are missing: scratch marks. At higher difficulties, it is absolutely necessary to be able to note eliminations or possibilities within a square. Without that, the best you can hope for is casual sudoku player, but soduku is by nature not a game for casual players.
This is exactly true. Soduku players are attracted to words like "difficult," "hard," "impossible," or any other challenge.
The level-up format sends a very strong signal that there are tons of "easy" puzzles and like many of these level-up games, it is going to take a while to get to "hard," and that is a tough investment to make when you are 99% sure the payoff doesn't exist.
It is a nice-looking game, but I don't get the impression the creator is someone involved in the soduku world or understands the market too well.
Think of soduku like you'd think of crosswords. Crosswords have a very quick ramp-up. Those that do well early and like it will quickly move on to the hard stuff, only bothering to do Monday and Tuesday as a speed-trial if they bother at all. They use ink instead of pencil and they get very upset at poorly designed puzzles and bad clues. In other words, you are dealing with a highly finicky crowd.
It's yet another sudoku game. No matter how good it is, or looks, you compete with the multitude of free sudoku games out there.
Try something more vertical niche, and hunker down. A fill-in-the-blank game is not super-profit worthy. Even Rovio took a decade before they hit it with Angry Birds.
Your main problem is that your app is a sudoku game. There are literally thousands of sudoku apps on Android (I just verified with a search). Your app probably doesn't even show up in the search results, which are limited to 20 pages on Google Play.
If you want to make money with anything, you start with checking your competition.
* Test your screenshots! Assume that 50% of the people in the market will never read your description. Right now, your screenshots communicate "Samurai game". Try a different direction, maybe one more Sudoku focused.[1] Test lots.
* Test your app icon. Test lots.
* You should have a purchase already. Review your monetization strategy. Most developers err on the side of under-monetizing their game, in the hopes that they won't "make players mad" or some other nonsense. Spoiler alert: you're wrong. Start your re-education here: http://www.edery.org/2012/08/your-first-f2p-game-where-you-w...
* Doing games is hard and a lot of what works in games is non-obvious. Be very skeptical of advice you get from anyone that hasn't done games.
* There is only one "tried and true" marketing channel - getting featured on the platform. Outside of that, you need to hustle hard to get your app featured in other places. You've reached out to "a few" sites and forums. Expand your reach to 10x as many sites and forums. Point to your past reviews as social proof for potential future reviews. No one site is going to bring in all the downloads - it's about building buzz and the snowball effect.
That's all I can think off the top of my head.
=======================================================
[1] - No one can tell you what's going to work best. The only way to know is to test.