Golf Royale

My background is actually in designing shirts way back in the day. So it has come full circle when people want merch for golfroyale.io now.

Any thoughts on who to use. I have made money from Redbubble in the past, but the best rates seem to be SpreadShirt?

So we had thousands of players playing our game thanks to being featured on the front page of miniclip.com during covid-19.

How much money did we actually make from having an .io game that people were actually playing.

Well, first of all how did we monetise our game?

Ads.

Specifically:

-1 banner ad on the front screen
-1 banner ad on the score screen
-1 video ad when loading into the next round of the game

Initially we couldn't actually get any decent ad networks to partner with us because we had no traffic initially. We ended up partnering with cpmstar.

On one hand I am thankful that they partnered with us because we were able to get experience working with integrating ads into our game; however, their CPM is a joke. For serving 60k impressions we got about $10 USD.

Luckily, the creator of miniroyale2.io reached out to me and referred me to the network he uses, AdInPlay.com - their CPMs are more like $1.2EUR for video ads and $0.25EUR for banners. I can also refer anyone who is keen, hmu.

Since joining AdInPlay we served roughly:

• 250k video ad impressions
• 600k banner ad impressions

Estimated gross revenue in their dashboard tells me about $400EUR so far.

So is it worth it?

Well, in terms of money, definitely not. In terms of experience and making something people used for a moment in time, priceless. Plus, I was able to build it, launch it, and refine it during covid when I wasn't doing anything else anyway, so it was great timing.

Would I recommend making an .io game? Would I do another one?Only if I could validate the idea or build an audience who will hang around for a long time.

We had already dramatically improved average session duration from 2m 07s to 10m 26s by making the game better with feedback from our small Discord community and with the help our analytics.

Now we wanted more players.

We contacted some of the bigger game sites.

Through pure luck we got featured on the frontpage of miniclip.com for about 30 days.

This drove a significant amount of traffic to our game, I'll lay out our traffic over that month.

1. miniclip.com - 56,657(46.87%)
2. minijuegos.com - 14,380(11.90%)
3. pacogames.com - 7,004(5.79%)
4. crazygames.com - 6,979(5.77%)
5. iogames.space - 5,470(4.52%)
6. igroutka.net 4,606(3.81%) <---Supported us from day #1
7. games.cdn.famobi.com - 3,728(3.08%)
8. gameflare.com - 2,886(2.39%)
9. kraloyun.com - 2,722(2.25%)
10. bestgames.com - 1,933(1.60%)

We also tried reaching out to YouTubers, Twitch, and Reddit. As with our past games, they were little help.

This was a great time for me, very exciting and I learnt a lot about running something people actually use.

In the next post I'll talk about how we montised the game and how much we made from this spike.

The game had launched, we had players, but we wanted more and we wanted them to play for longer.

The first thing I did was put in custom analytics, collecting how many people finished levels, how many putts it took them, how many levels they played. What levels they left on etc.

The results?

The default levels we were making players play sucked, they were too hard for the new player.

We put in better levels and made the first level they load into a really easy one.

Also I noticed a lot of players were not even moving at all when they loaded into the game.

They couldn't figure out how to play! This was a disaster. The instructions were in English, this was useless as most of our players were from non-English speaking countries.

I made a animated gif that explained how to play when they load into the game.

These two changes alone took use from 2m 07s to 5m 57s average session duration. Nearly a 300% increase in average session duration!

This measuring and iterating thing was working. I was hooked. What else could I do to keep them playing for longer.

Well, I could make the game look better, I got the feeling our game looked crappy compared to other 3d .io games. Also, we had no way to interact with our players.

So I set off improving the graphics and added a link to a Discord server for our game.

After I had done this instantly we had players joining the Discord and asking for roles and making suggestions. This was invaluable, direct feedback and interaction with community made a huge difference on what we decided to work on. It was also really nice to talk to players who loved the game. We decided to engage heavily with our Discord community and add many things they asked for.

During this time we added more level creation features, coins, hats, skins, removed features they hated, and gave the game a complete graphics overhaul.

After 2 months of adding community suggestions we achieved an average session duration of 10m 26s. Starting from 2m 07s, we had achieved roughly a 5x increase in session duration.

It was time to start promoting the game more. In the next post I'll go over how we grew the game to over 120k lifetime players and over 5k registered accounts.

I had players, I could see them. I even played a few games with them.

But we had no chat and no data, I had so many questions about these players. We had just built the game, we were so focused on game-play we didn't really think about measuring anything. So naive, haha.

How many players did we actually have? Where were they from, how did they find the site? So many questions.

I rushed to put analytics in.

Google Analytics answered a lot of my questions. We were getting about 200-600 players a day mostly from this one Russian website we had submitted to.

I started looking into the analytics more and nearly straight away saw a massive red flag.

Average session duration: 2m 07s.

This was really low considering our whole business model is based around players playing for a long time and seeing a lot of ads.

We needed to increase our average session duration. We also needed more data.

I'll explain how we got average session duration to 5x that number in the next post.

We spent around 3.5 months building the initial version of the game.

We built it fully in secret, smashing code and features out everyday. It was high velocity and also exhausting.

We really should have built in public, we were just so focused on coding we didn't care - but we've walked that road many times before and audience building really should happen in tandem or before working on the game. Next time, for real.

Anyway we had built something and we began contacting some sites to link to our game in an iframe. To our surprise our buddy who built krunker.io was right, these sites are happy to give you traffic.

People were playing our game. An awesome feeling.

Not many people. And mostly Russians from this one website. But still, people were playing it.

Immediately we had a lot of questions.

How do we know what people are doing in the game? Why are they leaving? How do we get them to play for longer?

Analytics. I'll explain more in the next post.

I had just spent a week down in Melbourne for Games Connect Asia Pacific where I had met up again with an friend from university who made krunker.io - he told me he was getting millions of players and he also told me how he did it. I was then inspired to do the same.

I was going to make an .io game.

On the flight back I was brainstorming with my friend and he suggested doing something like trackmania where the networking is a playback system. I liked this because it sounded easier than conventional game networking I had done in the past. After a bit more brainstorming we landed on minigolf - probably because we had played it the night before.

So minigolf + trackmania and off we went registering the domain golfroyale.io