Exoloper has been out for a month and a bit now and the overall reception has been great! It's currently sitting at 4.0 stars out of five globally on the Appstore with ~100 ratings. The reviews are generally really nice and supportive, and the feedback I've been getting is great. Theres' bugs, but they're being caught and sorted at a dececnt rate. Theres balance issues but none of them break the game in a way thats unfair to players. Overall it's in excellent shape.
There's a lot that's gone well with this launch, and I'm super proud of the myself for launching another pretty dang cool game.
But.
The sales have been non existant, and the reason for that, so far as I can see now, is that the game basically doesn't encourage the player to ever spend money. The funniest part is thats by design, I designed this game from the perspective of someone who despises modern practices in games, who hates microtransactions, who hates games farming analytics from their players, who cannot stand ads or paid blockers. So, the game launched with the only two surfaces to spend money being in the settings menu, where there's a tip button, and in the new campaign menu when selecting which campaign to buy. The latter menu disappeared when you had an active campaign, and was the primary purchase surface.
Suffice to say I didn't really.. really think through my pricing and sales strategy. I spent so long making a game that I thought would be good, and assumed that would be enough to translate to sales. Let me spell that out: Making a "good" game will very rarely equate to sales in a free to play market. If I'd thought about it for more than a milisecond I'd have quickly come to that conclusion, if a the free part of the game is good enough, why would anyone spend a cent on it?
With hindsight I probably should've just made this a paid game, but the primary guiding data point behind the f2p choice was the tens of millions of Impressions Interloper got at launch, and its overall relatively low conversion rate from impressions to sales. "If only Interloper was free" I thought, "then way more people would play it".
So the game has made (to this date) a total of about $200 AUD. For reference, I also work as an independent contract game dev, charging hourly rates, this makes the total sales worth far less than an hour of my time, for a game I've spent about two years work on. To be blunt, that's pretty disappointing.
I've been in a pretty raw state this past month. Launching a game is hard, launching a game that makes no money, harder. I spent the first couple weeks just putting out as many fires as I could (expected with launch) and last week I had some brain space to figure out what to do. Way I saw it I had a few options
So when you're given a whole host of options you don't like, which do you choose? The one that is the most logical. So I'm exploring #3 on that list. The free campaign gives players absolutely no incentive to unlock more content, as it can be played infintely. To remedy that, I'm thinking of making these changes:
This is a campaign run that you can complete 1-3 times each day, after which you'll be locked out of it. It'll become the free component of the game, but will also be available to everyone. A random campaign will be picked (of all campaigns, even currently locked-behind-paywall ones) and you'll get to play through it as normal. If you complete all objectives and extract, you'll be placed on a leaderboard. Players who do this quickest, with the most destruction will score best. If I decide to allow multiple runs, you'll be able to update your score if its better.
I'm very aware there are a few instances of insta-player-kills in the game that can make a single daily run punishing for new players. They should be rare enough, but they exist and as such I'm exploring allowing between one and three attempts. Reducing that allowance should increase friction enough to push some players to buy a campaign pack, or unlock everything.
The current free campaign will become a cheap paid unlock ($0.99 or $1.99 USD) and will function exactly as before, allowing infinite playthroughs of the campaign. It won't lock any items behind it though.
My initial plan was to launch new campaign packs that came with all the bells and whistles of the Demeter campaign. New Exo's, weapons, maps, etc. This will shift to go to something like a Seasonal model, where each "season" contains a new campaign, but then several smaller item packs. Think "Warp Exo Pack" for $0.99 and you get the general gist. This breaks up the release cadence and adds both more purchase options and better value for the Unlock All Button.
A new button will be added to the DLC page to unlock all content. This will be another single paid IAP of something like $5-10 USD (or like, 80% the cost of all available IAP's) . This will unlock all other IAP's and allow the user to turn off the DLC page button if they like, effectively making this the premium purchase option. This will persist for all future content as well, however the plan is to regularly increase the price of this IAP as more content is added to the game, meaning anyone who buys in early will get it cheap on the promise of future content (and all current content)
The Demeter campaign won't change in any meaningfull way other than this. Anyone who has bought demeter will automatically be upgraded to "unlock all" status, as a thank you for anyone who bought the second campaign. Everyone else will still need to buy it.
I'm in the middle of working through these updates, they add a lot of compelxity to an already complex game, and complexity usually just means bugs, so I'm taking my time. There's a lot still up in the air, and a bunch of life stuff that might get in the way, but this is where I'm at right now. I expect these changes may hit within the next two weeks? Maybe?