From riches to rags - An App gone bad...

It's back! One of my favourite pieces of Work - Jungle Path - is back in my hands... want to hear a story of high's and lows?

I wrote Jungle Path simply because I'm a nerd, and wanted to figure out how games like Flow created their levels.

So, I made a little test that placed dots on a grid, and tried to connect them with path-solving and without connections crossing. It was fun to code, and then slowly it turned into it's own game.

I released this in January 2020, and not much happened - it sat on the AppStore and did small numbers.

Then one day - a HUGE phone call out of the blue. Apple Retail... and they wanted to feature Jungle Path in the physical Apple stores world-wide!

Whaaaaat! That was crazy, but of course I accepted and built a "For Retail Purposes" demo. Such a high honour, and seeing your App on the retail phones was surreal!

This led to quite a few nice downloads, and eventually Apple started also featuring it on the AppStore, in some really great lists. It became viable to pop some adverts in it - just a little AdMob banner.

See the charts for what happened! Gadzooks.... it's best day was £4,000 in one day! I was ecastic obviously.

Shortly after this success I started getting emails from game publishers who wanted to take it onboard and grow it further.

I was intrigued, and had always felt I'd love a good publisher behind one of my games to help with marketing. I had a few to choose from - and went with the publisher I felt was the most genuine after some emails and video calls.

We had discussed revenue split and monetisation via adverts and got a contract together and signed for a 1-year deal.

Jungle Path got transferred to their Apple ID, and I was asked to implement the usual trackers - yucky - but OK.

After a short while, the publisher asked to change the monetisation method. They wanted to remove the Ads and move to a subscription model, at a very low monthly cost. I wasn't too pleased with this idea - but figured they knew best - so we made the changes to the code.

Straight away, the monetisation dropped. No more Ads, and the subscription take rate was very low.

Then one day, out of nowhere and without my knowledge, the publisher had changed the subscription to £30/month. A shocking value I'm sure you'll agree, and a business approach that I am very much against especially for a casual game like this.

Reviews nose-dived, users abandoned the game, and very very quickly the game was lost at sea. I fought for them to change the revenue model back, but it seems the publisher was having bigger problems and my emails were not being replied too. When they did eventually reply, I was told the contract held and they make the decisions.

Poor old Jungle Path died a horrible death. There was nothing I can do - stuck in a shitty contract, very sad to see my work tarnished and ruined, and gutted that I'd lost an amazing source of revenue.

It's now been over 6 months since the contract expired and finally, after much digging and some sleuth work - I found a contact at the Publishers parent company who agreed to transfer the App back to my Apple ID.

I was skeptical - but I'm very pleased to say - it happened! Jungle Path is back in my arms - and the first thing I did was update it to remove all traces of that shitty publisher, the horrible monetisation and (for now) all adverts are gone.

So, lessons learnt?

Ad revenue is viable - even on just a single banner. But you need scale.

Be careful who you trust. Game Publishers are focused on metrics, and don't care about you or your game.

Nice things can happen to nice people, so keep building, and one day that phone call out of the blue will be you :)