Our game just made $15,000 from 1800+ sales in the first week!
We've been working on the app version of the popular board game "Maracaibo" for almost 2 years now.
We finally released the game 7 days ago, priced at $7.99 on Android and iOS, and we've hit almost 1900 sales since then! Before the platform fees, our week 1 gross revenue is $15,029.19.
It feels incredible to write this post - this is not only the first money Maracaibo Digital has made, but it's also the first serious money our business has made since we founded Spiralburst Studio in 2019. This is a huge step toward something sustainable, though we're aware this isn't reliable MRR yet.
Revenue Breakdown
The pie is being sliced several times since we have a deal with the game's publisher to split revenue, and we're also a 3-person team with an equal split. The breakdown for this first week looks like this:
$15,029.19 - Gross sales revenue
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$2,254.38 - 15% platform fee for Google Play and App Store
$6,387.41 - Publisher's share (50% of the remainder)
$2,129.14 - Co-Founder's share @felicia_laurena
$2,129.14 - Co-Founder's share @acburst
$2,129.14 - My share
For me personally, $2,129.14 is a ton of money, enough to cover almost 4 months of rent. Considering that I quit my job 1 year ago and have been burning through savings, this is literally the game-changer we've been working towards. I had projected my budget prior to quitting, and March 2022 would have been the time to get a job if we still had made no money.
From that post, I stated our goal was to sell 10,000 copies in 2021. We ended up delaying the game multiple times, so I will happily move that goalpost to June, 2022 :)
What's next?
Taking a bit of a break is definitely the first order of business, and that has lined up nicely with the holidays! We also received solid ratings at launch, which has helped us rest easy. We've just got to keep that up.
Starting next year though, we'll reach out to more board game designers and try to secure another contract. We should be able to negotiate a higher up-front payment and/or a more favorable revenue split, now that we have a successful project in our portfolio. Maracaibo being a Top 50 board game should also help start conversations!
Our original word game, Hexicon, also needs some love, so we'll come back to that soon. We have ideas for completely new games, and those would be exciting to work on as well.
Finally, we've got a board game recommendations blog which we'll continue to slowly add to. We may port its layout to our company's site and launch an indie-dev-focused blog there eventually. It would be cool to use our own games as case studies to help others learn about design, marketing, analytics, etc.
Thanks for reading!
Amazing. Congratulations and keep going !
I've heard good things about the board game! You think you'll be a board game shop? Or looking forward to additional genres?
It's a great board game! We still even play it in person despite working on the app for so long.
I think we'll at least try to do a couple of more board game apps. If we generally find success and enjoyment with that, we'll keep it as a core part of the business. As for specific genres of board games to target for apps...definitely something simpler, like tile-laying games or more basic card games without a board, like Loveletter or Coup (both of which already have apps though). We've been playing a lot of deckbuilders recently, so those would be cool to target for apps as well.
Very impressive, especially living in a high-cost country!
How early on did you work out the agreement with the publisher?
Thanks! Yes, we'll see if we can make it work long-term : )
Here's a rough timeline in 2020:
We took a bit of a gamble starting work early, but we wanted to help them build confidence in us to secure the contract.
Nice! I’ll follow you here and keep up on the journey.
Congratulations! Can you share your launch strategy?
Leading up to launch we had ~1800 people on our mailing list and 25 contacts on our press list who had agreed to write something or make a post/video about the game. Our schedule looked like this:
That's great, congrats!
I always wondered how games are being marketed, seems like an even more competitive market than SaaS for example.
You seem to have nailed it!
Thanks! I think our biggest advantage with Maracaibo is the fact that many people already know and like the physical game. This recognition isn't something that new video game titles usually get, unless players are already fans of the studio making that game.
But our general approach was way more effective than when we launched our own mobile game from 0!
Congratulations, Christian. Keep growing.
Congrats Christian, I've really enjoyed following you and your team's journey!
Have a couple questions:
Thanks Justin!!
For the price, we looked at many other board game apps and mainly considered their quality, complexity of game, and the modes of play available (online multiplayer, solo, campaign/story). This helped us hone in on a range of $6.99 to $9.99, for relatively complex games that had solid UI and implementation quality.
However, we did not include online multiplayer in this first release, and we know this was a big ticket feature that players would miss. Terraforming Mars, Root, and Concorida are well-implemented, complex games that sell for $9.99 but have online multiplayer, so we took $2 off this price to get $7.99. We had some back and forth with the publisher/designer too, and agreed it was good.
We did see more people download Hexicon, but it's free to play so it's less of a serious income boost (have not seen new sales of ad-free yet). It does prove that cross-promotion is possible but I think we need more players to join. However we did add a "More from Spiralburst" button in the game's home screen with links to our other products, and Good Game Shelf performed better, since board gamers would care more about its content. So that is a big takeaway for us.
How did you handle the marketing for this mobile game?
The physical board game of Maracaibo is well known and already has an existing fanbase, so marketing the app version has actually been easier than marketing our own word game. When apps are announced in the board game community, many people who own the game or want the game will get pretty excited and spread the word organically.
We announced the game in August 2020 and set up a mailing list. This got almost 2000 signups by the time we launched last week. About 1000 signed up in the first month, and then a steady trickle of ~50-100 per month joined after. The open rate was at least 60% for every email we sent, since everyone was excited about the game. The final launch email had 70% open rate and 47% of those people clicked to the stores.
The mailing list was our primary strategy, but some other things we did:
Oh nice! Congrats! Glad you guys pushed through!
Congrats!
Hello, I like your game and also the sale it's awesome. Do you give me an idea I want to generate also sales from my website. you can check and ping me
Nice.
Congratulations
Congratulations. Keep it up and all the best!
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I was in the mobile games market at one point years ago. It seems that it's not a good market for indie devs anymore. But I know a lot of indie devs go with publishers to handle the marketing these days.
I think this is still mostly true because the market is so saturated. We've made something like $300 from Hexicon over its lifetime because to make more, we'd need to sink a lot more money into ads or constantly improve the game.
We also tried to seek out publishers last year but ultimately it fell through after some ad test campaigns. I'm not sure we'll pursue a publisher again now that we have at least one path to make money but we'll see, depends on the game for sure.
All in all I agree it's still very hard to make a one-off game as an indie dev and expect great results. Probably need to fail with several games before finding success with one like other products on IH. At least that is our hope : )
This is a great point, and we've encountered quite a few companies that specialize in games like Sudoku and standard card games like Poker or Solitaire. They basically build a portfolio of these easy games for solid income and then start making their own original games.
Definitely less glamorous but I imagine you're right in that it could be quite simple and profitable. Not a bad thing to consider if we need a low-effort boost.