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I've built an Online Escape Room with my friends :)
by
Lord__Eleven
https://elevenpuzzles.com
Intriguing. And great timing.
After you play it once, I suppose it's no longer as much fun to play it again with the same group...?
Yes, that similar to how escape rooms work or any other puzzle-oriented game. From a business perspective that's a downside for sure. There is no MRR either. But it was so much fun to build and looks like customers have fun playing it!
At the end of the game we're asking to leave an e-mail if they enjoyed our game and would like to play another one. Most of the players sign up! That way we're building a database of potential customers for future games.
That’s pretty cool. Good luck! We bought a Jack box bundle over the holidays for about the same price. Part of its appeal was knowing we can replay it for a while. My wife “hired” the game for playing with her distanced family members and us together regularly.
I imagine your escape room would be “hired” for a specific itch to scratch: novelty, challenge, collaboration, get a group to move to a new level of cohesiveness, get a group to experience a collective success.
What I mean when I say “hire”:
https://sharpen.page/jtbd/optimize/when-my-product-is-purchased-for-new-use-cases/
Congrats! Great visuals and interface. How many users have played? Curious what your marketing strategy is.
Thank you! So far around 15 teams have played (excluding friends and family) with very little marketing. We posted some ads on Facebook and AdWords. AdWords ate the budget very quickly and had no conversions. Facebook was a bit better, we sold enough games to get invested money back.
We contacted some reviewers to check our game out, posting on various forums, groups, etc. So far we have one review up (a very positive one!) and hopefully, others are coming. We think, in the long term, this is what can make the game take off.
Later in the pipeline, we have Product Hunt (don't want to go there too quickly), we want to expand our website (will post other escape room reviews, we love them and want to help them out too!).
Browser games seem quite difficult to sell, as you need the traffic to come to your site. Gamers look for games on Steam or App Stores. Luckily we position our game to be for escape room lovers, not necessarily gamers, so naturally, we need to reach them elsewhere.
In general, we don't want to use any shady tactics or anything like that. We want it to grow organically. Looks game is quite good (every player told us to notify them when we release the next one!) so we think it might happen :)
We're quite optimistic because if we keep the sales at the current level, we'll be able to cover the operating costs and finance at least one more game :) I expect the sales to go up though, since we just started!
Appreciate the detailed response! Full disclosure, I've been working on an escape room as a side project for the past month. I got the idea after doing a virtual escape room as a company sponsored teambuilding activity. The experience was fun, but I couldn't shake the idea that I could build a better one myself (as a professional full stack developer with experience in 3D design and creative writing).
I noticed your pricing model is a flat $10 fee for any number of players, performed at any time without the external guidance of a gamemaster. While this makes a lot of sense in terms of automation, I wonder if you're leaving a substantial sum of money on the table. Many competitors in this field charge a per person fee then facilitate the zoom meetings with a host. Especially geared towards the 'corporate teambuilding' aspect like this (https://www.puzzlebreak.us/virtual-teambuilding) a single group could bring in hundreds of dollars as opposed to $10. Here's another competitor, for instance, that charges $29 per ticket with a 4 person minimum (https://www.escapology.com/en/@home/book-games). What are your thoughts on the subject?
When doing research for the topic of escape rooms I searched the indie hackers site and this was the only example I could find of a 'virtual' escape room. There's not a lot of active projects in this domain. I wonder how the launch of ProductHunt will do since the audience is primarily developers/hackers and escape rooms are really more group games for non-traditional gamers who possibly don't have a Playstation of gaming PC.
My excitement about completing the project and launching has ebbed and flowed over time. It seems promising when targeting a corporate angle (imagine 20-5000 customers in a single day each paying the price for a single game) but I'm not sure individual sales will be possible at a $10 per game/unlimited size price point (the expense and difficulty in conversions being shown by your experience in AdSense).
It's nice to chat with someone in the same field and I appreciate your transparency. Like most things, I feel the more time and energy you put into the project, the more it will grow over time. I look forward to playing!
That's a great side project to have! Our group is working full-time as well and do everything after hours or over weekends. It was difficult, but we enjoyed every second of it!
Probably you noticed, but we don't target our game to companies (yet). We wanted to start small, test the waters, and see where it takes us. Automation is a big part of the project and was a requirement. As I mentioned, we all work full-time, so working as a gamemaster would be difficult. Also, there is no better feeling than waking up in the morning and noticing that more people bought and played the game while you slept!
We don't think about the money that much. We priced it similarly to the competition for a reason: to position it evenly with others but to provide a better experience. In general, we really wanted to create a game that we all would love to play. Not to make the most money, not to over-optimize sales, just to build something that we'd enjoy, and possibly others would too.
I don't know where this approach will take us, but the start is very promising! We're ready to pivot or expand at any moment, but there is time for that.