{"id":95354,"date":"2019-06-20T06:28:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T06:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/344896"},"modified":"2019-06-20T06:28:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T06:28:00","slug":"cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/06\/20\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultist Simulator mobile: The all-singing, all-dancing data dump"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We launched a mobile port of&nbsp;<em>Cultist Simulator<\/em>&nbsp;on the&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"App Store (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/apps.apple.com\/us\/app\/cultist-simulator\/id1439886655\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">App Store<\/a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"Google Play (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/details?id=com.playdigious.cultist\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Google Play<\/a>&nbsp;in April 2019. Here\u2019s how it\u2019s gone so far. I hope you like DATA!<\/p>\n<h2><strong>TLDR<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Cultist Simulator<\/em>&nbsp;mobile is&nbsp;2 months on from launch&nbsp;on iOS and Android<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>we signed a 50\/50 rev split with&nbsp;Playdigious, a great porting house\/publisher<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>it\u2019s gone&nbsp;middling-well&nbsp;so far:\n<ul>\n<li>\u20ac200k net rev<\/li>\n<li>lots of featuring across both stores<\/li>\n<li>great ratings (~4.8\/5\u2605)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>localising into&nbsp;simplified Chinese&nbsp;was a great idea<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>premium mobile ports are&nbsp;a good strategy for extra \u00a3&nbsp;if you\u2019re a small indie studio (this was a moderate success, so we\u2019ll probably do this again)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>but if you actually want to make revenue comparable to PC,&nbsp;F2P \/ subscription models&nbsp;are better bets (shocking, I know).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"486\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump.png\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<h2><strong>IN THE BEGINNING WERE TWO NERDS<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Weather Factory was a two-person team in 2018. Our studio strategy was to get our name out there as wide and as impressively as possible. We needed to amplify our voice and add to the limited studio credit of a new, small start-up. (All we had was Alexis\u2019s legacy and ~16k Twitter following, from him founding Failbetter Games and making&nbsp;<em>Fallen London<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Sunless Sea<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>We were severely restricted by being only two people. We could only realistically focus on one project at a time, but we knew that diversification \u2013 of audience, and of revenue streams \u2013 was necessary to insulate our indie studio against the unpredictability of game dev.<\/p>\n<p>Gaining as big an audience as we could was more important than maximising revenue. This strategy was the main reason we signed a PC publishing deal with Humble Bundle. It also told us pretty clearly we should find a porting house and publisher to make a mobile version of&nbsp;<em>Cultist Simulator<\/em>&nbsp;while we focused on post-launch PC development.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>ENTER PLAYDIGIOUS<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-1.png\"><\/p>\n<p>I spoke to a bunch of mobile porting houses (hey, AJ!) before settling on&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"Playdigious (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/playdigious.com\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Playdigious<\/a>, the excellently French porting and publishing house currently working on the&nbsp;<em><a aria-label=\"Dead Cells mobile port (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/playdigious.com\/dead-cells\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Dead Cells<\/a><\/em><a aria-label=\"Dead Cells mobile port (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/playdigious.com\/dead-cells\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&nbsp;mobile game<\/a>. Playdigious came with a personal recommendation from someone I trust and respect (hey, Tom Bidaux!) but were also the only specifically&nbsp;<em>premium<\/em>&nbsp;mobile specialist I found.<\/p>\n<p>Playdigious felt right from the start, and now that I\u2019ve worked with them for nearly a year, I can\u2019t recommend Xavier and his team enough. We signed a 50% rev share deal where Playdigious covered the cost of porting and took responsibility for the project, leaving us to stick our noses in as much or as little as we liked. We were free to focus on&nbsp;<em>Cultist<\/em>\u2018s PC development and other Weather Factory projects (like, say,&nbsp;<em><a aria-label=\"BOOK OF HOURS (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http:\/\/weatherfactory.biz\/bookofhours\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">BOOK OF HOURS<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>The plan was to launch on the App Store and Google Play in Russian and Chinese some time in 2019 for a \u00a36.99 \/ $6.99 price point. Most of that happened!<\/p>\n<h2><strong>PORTING&nbsp;<em>CULTIST SIMULATOR<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Here\u2019s our timeline:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"96\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-2.png\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s all pretty bunched up towards the end, much more so than this producer likes. This is because premium mobile games live or die by features, particularly on the App Store, and plutonium-heavy hints were dropped that&nbsp;<em>releasing at the start of April<\/em>&nbsp;would&nbsp;<em>definitely be a good time.<\/em>&nbsp;We settled on the second week of April, only to be told that really, Tuesday 2nd April would&nbsp;<em>definitely<\/em>&nbsp;be better. This coincided with the start of the&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"2019 London Games Festival (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http:\/\/games.london\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">2019 London Games Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Tuesday 2nd April was 2-4 weeks earlier than initially planned, but Playdigious took it in their stride.&nbsp;We would not have been able to make this deadline on our own. It\u2019s another reason I\u2019m glad we signed with a publisher, and struck a deal that made them care about the port as much as we did.<\/p>\n<p>However, there were casualties. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that only Chinese is noted on the timeline, despite us wanting to launch with both Russian and Chinese. Loc is a whole other story, but the short version is Russian translation was dropped in order to ensure we could meet our new, earlier release date. (We\u2019ll release Russian later down the line \u2013 I hear if you\u2019re smart you can have a pseudo second launch with a new language on the App Store. Time will tell!)<\/p>\n<h2><strong>MARKETING<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>You don\u2019t normally spend lots of money on a premium mobile game launch. Premium mobile marketing seems to rely on building hype around an upcoming release via pre-registration campaigns and social media, and then doing whatever dark magic you must to give yourself the best chance of a feature on launch.<\/p>\n<p>Featuring is much more of a thing on the App Store, where they have multiple games editors selecting Games of the Day, \u2018Games we\u2019re playing now\u2019, top genre lists, top indie picks, top ten games around a particular theme\u2026<\/p>\n<p>The Google Play Store is much more algorithmically driven. As far as I understand, Google Play wants its algorithm to recommend particular games to particular users based on their previous purchase habits. If you\u2019ve played any premium narrative games in the past few weeks, you may see&nbsp;<em>Cultist Simulator<\/em>&nbsp;appear in your store. But if all you play is&nbsp;<em>Candy Crush<\/em>, maybe you won\u2019t. Correct me below if I\u2019m wrong!<\/p>\n<p>Playdigious, our mobile experts, spearheaded marketing. They sent through a great marketing strategy which identified strengths (nothing else like it), weaknesses (what the hell is it), opportunities (featuring on stores you might not think of, like Razer) and risks (no China featuring, because it\u2019s all about cults). As mentioned above, the campaign also centred on pre-registration.<\/p>\n<p>Playdigious recommended focusing only on&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"Google Play pre-registrations (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/googleplay\/android-developer\/answer\/9084187?hl=en\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Google Play pre-registrations<\/a>, as&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"Apple's pre-order system (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/app-store\/pre-orders\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Apple\u2019s pre-order system<\/a>&nbsp;discounts pre-orders from your launch numbers and so undermines your app\u2019s performance at launch (like the problems moving from Early Access to full launch on Steam). They also recommended pricing&nbsp;<em>Cultist<\/em>&nbsp;much higher than I\u2019d expected \u2013 $6.99 \/ \u00a36.99 \u2013 but offering a 30% discount (ish) for early adopters. This meant anyone pre-registering would get&nbsp;<em>Cultist<\/em>&nbsp;for $4.99 \/ \u00a34.99, and to be fair to App Store users, we\u2019d offer the same price point for one week at launch across both stores.<\/p>\n<p>So: we aimed simply to get iOS users to sign up to a mailing list we could then ping when&nbsp;<em>Cultist<\/em>was out, and launched a Google Play pre-registration campaign along with a press release and social media fanfare at the end of February. Running roughly a month until full release, we managed to nab 200k pre-registrations by launch and, thanks to the efforts of Playdigious and their good relationship with Google Play, saw significant featuring in Google\u2019s&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"'Pre-registration games' (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/collection\/promotion_3000000d51_pre_registration_games?hl=en_GB\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">\u2018Pre-registration games\u2019<\/a>&nbsp;section.<\/p>\n<p>(Weird that that 200k keeps popping up. Let\u2019s annoy data analysts and conclude that 1 Google Play pre-registration = \u20ac1 net revenue in your pocket. Numbers don\u2019t lie, right?)<\/p>\n<p>In addition, Playdigious ordered a bunch of limited edition pins for social media giveaways\u2026<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"713\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-3.png\" width=\"500\"><\/p>\n<p>\u2026and commissioned a Chinese PR company,&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"Indienova (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/indienova.com\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Indienova<\/a>, to help handle our Chinese audience. In an astonishing middle-finger to probability, this PR company happened to be the same company we\u2019d unknowingly used for Chinese loc, so we ended up working with our lead translator as our PR lead in China. A wonderful serendipity! We love u, Craft. &lt;3<\/p>\n<p>I wasn\u2019t in charge of our marketing campaign like I was for the PC launch, but from what I saw, it seems (ironically) a lot harder to mobilise a mobile audience than a PC one. Everything seems more ephemeral: there are fewer mobile press outlets, much less interest in open development, and almost no mobile-specific communities you can tap on the road to release. I guess this is what you get from a much more casual audience who wouldn\u2019t describe themselves as \u2018gamers\u2019 as much as your traditional PC player. There\u2019ll be a way to nab \u2019em, I\u2019m sure \u2013 but I haven\u2019t figured out how yet!<\/p>\n<h2><strong>LAUNCH<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>We launched on&nbsp;Tuesday 2nd April 2019, the same day as the&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"London Games Festival (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"http:\/\/games.london\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">London Games Festival<\/a>&nbsp;started. There were very few technical bugs (yay Playdigious!) and we saw some decent featuring in our first week:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"219\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-4.png\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Tuesday 2nd April:&nbsp;London Games Festival front-page featuring\n<ul>\n<li>iPads and iPhones<\/li>\n<li>UK and Ireland<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Wednesday 3rd April:&nbsp;\u2018Game of the Day\u2019\n<ul>\n<li>iPads and iPhones<\/li>\n<li>UK and Ireland<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Thursday 4th April:&nbsp;\u2018Meet the BAFTA nominees\u2019 editorial\n<ul>\n<li>iPads and iPhones<\/li>\n<li>UK and Ireland<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We saw a lot of smaller features alongside these, such as\u2026<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u2018New Game\u2019 featuring on iPad and iPhone in 42 countries<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\u2018What we\u2019re playing\u2019 featuring on iPad and iPhone in 27 countries<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u2026and we continue to see a lot of small-scale featuring even now:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"602\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump.gif\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<p>You might be thinking: \u201cLottie! This is better than \u2018decent\u2019 featuring!\u201d And you may be right. We probably did do better than your average Joe, because we\u2019d timed launch well, had a bit of buzz and had some good connections. But our sales didn\u2019t skyrocket with all this featuring the way they would have with lovely ol\u2019 iOS10\u2019s full-week feature slots, and I\u2019m still hurting that we seemed pigeon-holed to the UK and Ireland, and didn\u2019t get&nbsp;<em>any<\/em>&nbsp;featuring in the US.<\/p>\n<p>I assume it\u2019s because cults are funny period-drama things in Europe but serious subjects in America \u2013 but maybe the US editorial team just didn\u2019t like the game! Either way, the US has always been our highest revenue-generating country, so this omission absolutely hurt our sales. We\u2019ll see if we can wrangle a US feature with later updates\u2026<\/p>\n<h2><strong>THE JUICY BIT: SALES FIGURES<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Right! Number time. All the following data is taken from&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/appfigures.com\/\">AppFigures<\/a>, which I\u2019ve found comprehensive and easy to use. I\u2019m not a data analyst, so you may draw different conclusions from the following than I do. If you do, let me know!<\/p>\n<p><strong>\ud83d\udcb8&nbsp;REVENUE&nbsp;\ud83d\udcb8<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Just over two months from release, our overall performance looks like this:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"590\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-5.png\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s a&nbsp;net revenue of ~\u20ac200k (\u00a3178k \/ $226k), roughly split 60:40 between the App Store and Google Play. This means both Playdigious and Weather Factory have made \u20ac100k (\u00a389k \/ $113k) so far, which is nothing compared to F2P revenues but a significant extra bit of cash for a small indie team like us. I\u2019m happy! FOR NOW.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m surprised to see how similar the graphs are for both stores. Here they are separately:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"653\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-6.png\" width=\"646\">Google Play\u2019s spike on launch day was almost certainly down to our 200k pre-registrations. The App Store\u2019s seen a few more spikes, first at launch, then our largest spike on the 7th April (when we were featured in China), its secondary bump on 12th April (another small Chinese feature), then a moderate spike on 30th April (a third, middling-level Chinese feature). Yes, I&nbsp;<em>am<\/em>&nbsp;relieved we localised!<\/p>\n<p>The real question is how long-term this revenue is. I think it used to be the case that premium mobile games didn\u2019t have a terribly long shelf-life, and that you turned the money-hose on during a launch feature and then threw the money-hose away as soon as it was over. Time will tell if the iOS11 App Store has solved this problem, and if Google\u2019s analytics are worth their salt.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\ud83c\udf0d&nbsp;COUNTRIES&nbsp;\ud83c\udf0d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-7.png\"><\/p>\n<p>This is what we expected to see: Alexis\u2019s games have always gone down particularly well with these countries, generally in this order. Take a look at our PC sales for&nbsp;<em>Cultist Simulator<\/em>, for example:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-8.png\"><\/p>\n<p>What I think is really interesting, though, is the country split between the App Store and Google Play. Here\u2019re our top five countries in the App Store\u2026<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"161\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-9.png\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<p>\u2026and here are our top five on Google Play:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"161\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-10.png\" width=\"646\"><\/p>\n<p>Most significantly,&nbsp;Google Play is not currently available in China. This explains why China is missing from the top countries in Google Play, despite being our second-top country overall. But I find it interesting how big a jump there is between that top performing country and any after it. China dwarfs the US in terms of net downloads on the App Store (America shifted 30% of what China did). Equally, the US dwarfs the UK on Google Play (the UK shifted 20% of what the US did). See our major iOS revenue spikes every time we were featured in China\u2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u2b50&nbsp;RATINGS&nbsp;\u2b50<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-11.png\"><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m exceptionally happy with our ratings. We average 4.8\/5\u2605 across both stores: this is mind-blowing for a famously divisive game which&nbsp;<a aria-label=\"regularly slips into 'Mixed' recent reviews on Steam after high-visibility sales (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/718670\/Cultist_Simulator\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">regularly slips into \u2018Mixed\u2019 recent reviews on Steam after high-visibility sales<\/a>. I believe this is the result of three things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Apple\u2019s suggestion to lean into the difficulty of the game and flag the lack of tutorial as much as possible;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Playdigious doing a great job of the port, and coming up with an excellent touch-screen evolution of our original UI;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Cultist Simulator<\/em>&nbsp;being a good game! Good job, AK.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This graph looks the same whether for the App Store and Google Play. What this tells me is ratings are similar to the MMR (\u2018Match-Making Ratio\u2019) I\u2019ve banged on about on Steam. It seems that a premium game\u2019s launch is&nbsp;<em>the<\/em>&nbsp;moment you have to set a good rating for your game. I imagine it\u2019s quite hard to come back from a low-rating premium game launch.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\ud83d\udcc8&nbsp;RANKINGS&nbsp;\ud83d\udcc8<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019re our rankings over the last two months on Google Play, focusing on our top three performing countries: the USA, China and the UK.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt height=\"332\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-12.png\" width=\"646\">Here are our comparative rankings on the App Store:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/cultist-simulator-mobile-the-all-singing-all-dancing-data-dump-13.png\"><\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\ude31, right?<\/p>\n<p>These images are more for shock factor than purpose, so let me give you the highlights in our first week:<\/p>\n<p><strong>App Store ratings<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>UK (iPhone):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>#5 in paid apps<\/li>\n<li>#2 in card games<\/li>\n<li>#4 in simulation games<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>USA (iPhone):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>#28 in paid apps<\/li>\n<li>#3 in card games<\/li>\n<li>#10 in simulation games<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>China (iPhone):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>#6 in paid apps<\/li>\n<li>#1 in card games<\/li>\n<li>#2 in simulation games<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Google Play ratings<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>UK<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>#1 in new apps<\/li>\n<li>#1 in games<\/li>\n<li>#3 overall<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>USA<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>#1 in new apps<\/li>\n<li>#2 in games<\/li>\n<li>#2 overall<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>China:<\/p>\n<p><em>No data.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Rankings change daily, so these are extremely nice numbers, but the top ranking spots would only last a day or so. Still, I\u2019m not complaining!<\/p>\n<p>What I take away from this is there really is a much longer tail on mobile than I\u2019d thought. I was expecting high rankings on launch to quickly tail off into nothingness. That doesn\u2019t look like it\u2019s the case.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>SO: HOW DID WE DO?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Before we launched, I did a \u2018top down, bottom up\u2019 estimate for our best-case sales figures, bearing in mind<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I\u2019m not particularly experienced estimating launch figures, and<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>IT IS VERY HARD TO FIND MOBILE GAME DATA (hence this post)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I started with the numbers I had from launching Failbetter Games\u2019&nbsp;<em>Sunless Sea<\/em>&nbsp;iPad port and compared them to an extremely conservative % of ustwo games\u2019&nbsp;<em><a aria-label=\"Monument Valley 2 sales figures (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@ustwogames\/a-year-of-monument-valley-2-36754517a386\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Monument Valley 2<\/a><\/em><a aria-label=\"Monument Valley 2 sales figures (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@ustwogames\/a-year-of-monument-valley-2-36754517a386\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&nbsp;sales figures<\/a>as a sanity check.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s my working out for my best-case Year 1 sales on the App Store, as an example:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>Sunless Sea<\/em>&nbsp;was an expensive premium mobile game with a very similar audience to&nbsp;<em>Cultist Simulator<\/em><\/p>\n<p>BUT: it only launched on iPad, not iPhones<\/p>\n<p>AND: it only launched in English<\/p>\n<p>AND: it released in March 2017, when iOS10 still offered week-long global featuring (which&nbsp;<em>Sunless<\/em>&nbsp;managed to snag)<\/p>\n<p>***<\/p>\n<p><em>Sunless<\/em>&nbsp;saw ~183 million impressions from its week of global featuring on iOS10 in 2017, so:<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 let\u2019s assume&nbsp;<em>Cultist<\/em>&nbsp;gets good featuring on iOS11, and that\u2019s ~50% of good iOS10 featuring (= ~90 million impressions)<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 let\u2019s assume 10% click-throughs (= ~9 million page views)<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 let\u2019s assume 1% conversion (=&nbsp;~90k sales)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Comparing that to&nbsp;<em>Monument Valley 2<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>Monument Valley 2<\/em>&nbsp;is one of the most successful premium mobile games ever made<\/p>\n<p>it has a very different audience to&nbsp;<em>Cultist Simulator<\/em><\/p>\n<p>it also launched in June 2017 when iOS10 was still a thing<\/p>\n<p>***<\/p>\n<p>So:<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 let\u2019s assume&nbsp;<em>Cultist<\/em>&nbsp;does ~5% of&nbsp;<em>Monument Valley 2<\/em>\u2018s business (= ~2.1 million copies)<\/p>\n<p>=&nbsp;~105k copies&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>90k isn\u2019t too far off 105k copies, so I met in the middle and used 100k units for estimated year one sales on the App Store. This meant we were working towards:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Best case:&nbsp;100k units<\/p>\n<p>Middling case:&nbsp;50k units<\/p>\n<p>Worst case:&nbsp;2k units<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Two months in, we\u2019ve shifted ~59k units across the App Store (~35k) and Google Play (~23k) combined, so we\u2019re out of worse case territory and firmly on track for \u2018fine\u2019. I don\u2019t know enough about the long-term viability of iOS11\u2019s smaller but more frequent featuring + whatever arcane magic\u2019s behind Google Play\u2019s analytics to estimate where we\u2019ll be at the end of Year 1, but I suspect it\u2019ll be significantly below my best-case estimate. Still, this is extra revenue we wouldn\u2019t have seen if we hadn\u2019t ported, and signing the 50% rev deal with Playdigious meant we didn\u2019t invest much hard cash into the project. So the effect is as close to \u2018free\u2019 money as it\u2019s usually possible to get.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re reading this with more mobile experience than me, tell me how many units you think we\u2019ll make by the end of it all! Xavier estimated 80k units in the first year across the App Store and Google Play. But he\u2019s cheating because he\u2019s good at this. Let\u2019s play \u2018test the mobile specialist\u2019 and see how these numbers stack up in April 2020\u2026<\/p>\n<h2><strong>TAKEAWAYS<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>I intend to fold mobile ports into Weather Factory\u2019s projects here on out. Time will tell how much I also fold localisation in automatically (essentially, once I\u2019ve seen how Russian and Chinese perform on Steam), but I\u2019m extremely likely to include simplified Chinese as part of mobile porting.<\/p>\n<p><em>Cultist Simulator<\/em>\u2018s mobile port hasn\u2019t made us millionaires, but we didn\u2019t think it would. It&nbsp;<em>has&nbsp;<\/em>significantly shored up Weather Factory\u2019s coffers, and given us a significant boost to audience size, whom we can now tap about future games. This is a process I\u2019m very happy with for my studio, but like most processes we currently have at WF, it\u2019s unlikely to scale well. So my main advice here is: if you\u2019re a small studio without the resource to tap mobile yourself, it\u2019s absolutely worth seeing if you can find a publisher to push your game to new platforms&nbsp;<em>if that takes the development load off of you<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I intend to experiment further with other platforms, but have no official news on the subject right now! Let me know your thoughts on our data above, and if you have any additional numbers you\u2019d like to see. Hope our figures prove useful for devs considering mobile porting themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We launched a mobile port of&nbsp;Cultist Simulator&nbsp;on the&nbsp;App Store&nbsp;and&nbsp;Google Play&nbsp;in April 2019. Here\u2019s how it\u2019s gone so far. I hope you like DATA! TLDR Cultist Simulator&nbsp;mobile is&nbsp;2 months on from launch&nbsp;on iOS and Android we signed a 50\/50 rev split with&nbsp;Playdigious, a great porting house\/publisher it\u2019s gone&nbsp;middling-well&nbsp;so far: \u20ac200k net rev lots of featuring across [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}