One Month of Sheeping Around: Thoughts and Numbers
It has been one month since Sheeping Around released on the App Store. 10 days after the game was released, I did a retrospective of the game’s launch and how it performed. It is time to look back on the good, the bad and the ugly. It was the first game that I actually released, so the learnings that it brought me has been immense.
Bug Fixes
There were quite a few bugs on release, some of which were show-stopping, and made me release a Day 1 patch. For now, all the critical bugs are fixed, but here is a list of what bugs happened and:
IAPs not working at all: The IAPs would be charged but not be applied. This was the craziest bug of them all, which I got to know from a user who tried to hack the game to get IAPs for free. I got an error report for that, and when I checked, I found the real issue instead. He was the first person to download the game on release, and I fixed the issue fast enough so no damage was done.
Game Center randomly fails to log in 5-10% of users: People who could not log in using Game Center could not play the game at all. I fixed this by adding a fallback to anonymous login, but those folks could not edit their nickname.
Unable to edit nicknames: People who were unable to log in to Game Center could not edit their nickname. I added the feature to edit your nickname recently.
Problems with matchmaking and high dropouts at initial levels: People who had just started playing the game took a while to understand the rules and took a long time to play their turns and also quit midway. So for the initial few levels, I modified the game to always match against AI, until people are trained well enough to go battling PvP.
Bug with IAP price formatting in certain regions: For some places that use commas instead of periods for decimal places, the formatting logic for IAP prices was broken, and showed EUR€ 349,00 as the IAP price, when the actual price was EUR €3,49. This was crazy.
Empty hand: Sometimes people would start with an empty hand or with fewer than 5 cards in their hand. This was due to latency issues with the server, some of the events were missed.
Players wanting to play as Shepherd got Thief instead: Matchmaking now ensures that you are matched only with people who want to play as the opposite side.
Empty leaderboard / Long time to load leaderboard: This is now optimised, by adding a Redis caching layer on the backend for the leaderboard.
Players lose their coins / experience earned after a game: A very ugly bug, caused by many possible scenarios, especially when the opponent disconnects or times out, most of which have now been fixed.
Making a multiplayer game single handedly is hard, and while there were some show-stoppers, I’m glad they were fixed quickly, and not a lot of damage was done.
New Cards
As mentioned in the previous post, there are some new cards planned for future updates. Here’s a sneak peak at one of the new card called “Termites”:
This card works on the Thief’s side as a counter to Shepherd’s Fence and Electric Fence cards.
Effect: Spread termites to prevent building a Fence or an Electric Fence for the next N turns.
Features and Promos
I got a mail from Apple requesting feature graphics one week after release. It asked for banner graphics and Today page graphics (Game of the Day). I submitted them both by the deadline and the game was featured for a week in India. It did not get a Game of the Day, at least not so far.
Unfortunately, India is not my target market, and this banner feature got me just one sale throughout the week. Despite being the topmost banner, it was rather disappointing to see this stat. I expected at least a handful of sales. I even lowered the price to 90% down just for a day, just to see how it performed, and that is when it actually got that one sale.
Perhaps the banner wasn’t lucrative enough, but that cannot be right either, because people did click on the banner and did not convert after landing on the product page.
The game was also featured under “Pay Once and Play” for quite a long time, and it still is, as of writing this article in Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam. I’m getting a few sales from Thailand almost everyday, where it is still #6 in card games. In other countries, the game has vanished from almost all charts.
Android Release and Pricing
I released on Android two weeks after the release on iOS. It is free to play on Android, but because of lack of any marketing on that side, it isn’t doing so well there. It was perhaps a bad idea to launch as an iOS exclusive initially. Had the game been launched on Android to begin with, perhaps some of the audience could have spilled over to Android and gained some traction there.
This is a learning for my next game. As an indie, the game should be released on all supported platforms at the same time so that if the game gets featured on one platform, other platforms can get the spillover effect. A lot of people asked me when Android version would come out when the iOS version was released, and when it did come out, perhaps a lot of them had already forgotten about it. Attention moves fast in the mobile games world.
Also, a free to play game requires a lot of metrics like retention and life-time value to justify ad spend to acquire customers. Those metrics weren’t high enough for Sheeping Around. It would’ve been better to have the game as premium on Android as well, perhaps that way it could’ve performed a little better monetarily. Also, the paid charts are easier to climb than free to play charts, so that’s another advantage too.
I was worried that if the Android version gains a lot of traction, it might cloud the servers and affect gameplay of people who paid for the game. But now that I look back, I realize it is a good problem to have. I had setup my server to scale horizontally anyway as per the demand, and it was already handling 1000+ players playing per day easily during the peak, it could have easily scaled to handle 10k+ users per day as well.
As for the issue of piracy, it could have been avoided by validating purchase receipts of all users on the server.
Thoughts on Genre Mixing
Sheeping Around is a PvP card game with a different setting from rest of the PvP card games. Sometimes different isn’t really all that better. Sometimes its a lot about what your audience wants.
Some games mix two genres and do pretty well. Slay the Spire mixed deck-building and rogue-like sub-genres and did really well. The recent trend on mobile has been puzzle RPGs and puzzle PvP battle games, and while I’m not a big fan of them, they seem to be doing really well with the market.
Sheeping Around wasn’t exactly a mix of two genres, but it had one important shift from the norm that perhaps caused it to perform not so well compared to the others in the genre. It was a card game, that caters to the niche of people who enjoy thought provoking games, but it had casual graphics - the kind loved by people who enjoy idle games and puzzle games. So because of this theme and premise, the audience of the game reduced to an intersection of players who enjoyed a thought provoking game with casual graphics.
This can be proven by the really low conversion rate of the game during its launch week. Even during the time when I did a lowest price sale, the conversion rate only went as high as 0.8%. On average it loomed at 0.3-0.4%. I guess a lot of factors like visibility and the developer’s popularity matter here, but comparing it to others games in the Card game genre, it didn’t do so good.
For the uninitiated, the conversion rate I’m talking about is the percentage of people who bought the game amongst all the people who visited the product page that day.
This was true for my last game as well. My previous game Spellbound, when put up for Greenlight on Steam a few years ago, was a genre-mix of word games and adventure games. When you mix two genres like that, especially when one of the genres is obscure, your audience reduces to a small intersection of players. Especially for word games, it reduces only to people who can speak English well. I had realized this and eventually shelved the game. Perhaps I will work on it some time in the future, but only as a hobby project.
This was proven by the fact that despite the greenlight, the game got around 70% No votes.
Sales
The sales of Sheeping Around haven’t been as good as the launch week. And it will never be, since a game’s launch is like the blockbuster weekend, and any sales that happen thereafter will always be (much) lower than that.
Currently, the game has been making about $5-10 per day. At the current pace, I foresee the game to recover its outsourcing costs in more than a year. Not a very encouraging picture.
Closing Thoughts
While the game didn’t do well financially, it is encouraging to have some fans who love playing the game and give up to 7 hours playing the game each day.
Cheers to purplesky7836, who has spent a lot of time in the game. He has played 851 games and won 606 of them. There are no new cards unlocked after Lv. 50, so the incentive to play further goes away, but I’m glad to still see the players enjoying the core gameplay and continuing forward nevertheless.
On Sale Today
Thanks for reading so far. If you enjoyed the article, and haven’t bought the game yet, Sheeping Around is on sale just for today at a discounted price of $1.99. Go get it now!