Exobyte have been featured as a case study of success with mobile advertising on the Google Admob web site.

Admob sent out a request to companies last year asking them to submit their success stories with Admob.  I told my story about how successful Cherry Chaser had been and was selected to be a featured study.  This involved a phone call to the Admob team at Google's campus in Mountain View, California last year where we chatted about how I'd used AdMob to monetise my games.

The result is the case study featured on the AdMob web site:
http://www.google.com/ads/admob/success.html

The PDF file of the case study can also be viewed directly with the link below.

Over the past few years the public awareness of independently developed games has increased significantly.  This is largely due to a number of high profile games that have come from lone developers or small teams.  Games like Minecraft, DayZ and Plants vs Zombies have all been developed with an "indie" style game development process.  Even Angry Birds, one of the biggest game franchises of all, is considered by some to be a an indie game due to it being self-published by Rovio,

That raises the question of what exactly an indie game is and where do you draw the line between indie games and mainstream industry titles.  There doesn't seem to be a clear definition of what makes an indie games developer.

A purely technical definition of independently developed games is that they have been made independently of a publisher.  With this definition every game that is created and published by the same company is an indie game.  This definition feels slightly too strict to capture the essence of what most consider to be indie games.  There are examples of large "Triple A" titles that have been published by the developers that created them, especially in the mobile phone market where self publishing has become normal.  There are also examples of games that have been released through a publisher but still have a very indie feel.

So if the technical definition doesn't feel like it quite fits the subject area that the term has come to cover, what can we use as a defining attribute?

The primary factor is that independent games are developed independently of any external pressures on the design of the game.  The reason externally published titles often lose their indie feel is that the publisher puts pressure on the developer to alter their game design due to perceived market forces.  This also applies to self published games that have their game design changed under pressure from factors other than what makes a good game.  Even if a game is made by a lone developer, if the primary motivation is to "work an angle" or "cash in on a trend" then that isn't in the spirit of indie game development.

A second factor is that all of the team are engaged in creating a game that they themselves want to play. Games that are made by companies that are working a tried and tested process to earn a pay packet have a different feel to them.  This is from an advert for a game designer for a large commercial game developer: 

"use a variety of research techniques (e.g. surveys, observational studies) to better understand the needs, requirements and expectations of the target audience and the relative influence of industry trends/best practice".

In contrast, the designer of an indie game will usually just have a great idea that they want to turn into reality and know in their heart that it will be a great game without concern for market research or best practice.

...and by Denmark I mean Google Play, obviously.

Two years ago I released Cherry Chaser Slot Machine on to Google Play.  Within a few days it climbed near the top of the "New Releases" chart which led to lots of downloads and a good ranking in the overall charts.  When I released Super Snake Slot Machine later that year my target was to get another good ranking on the "New Releases" chart, to help this I cross promoted the game in Cherry Chaser.  The strategy was again successful with Super Snake also achieved a good position in the overall charts.

Just over a week ago, I released my third game on the Google Play store.  Plasma Duel is an air hockey game and so fell into the more congested "Arcade games" category on the site.  Even so I felt that with cross promotion in the other games and by experimenting with buying Admob banner ads in other apps I could at least get some exposure in "New Releases".  Last weekend I showed sixty thousand adverts for Plasma Duel in my other two games and during the past week so far I've purchased over five hundred thousand adverts in other applications that show banner adverts.  The net result from these advertising campaigns so far is about a hundred additional installations of Plasma Duel.  The total number of downloads of Plasma Duel is now just over three hundred.  It's been reviewed thirteen times with an average rating of four and a half stars.

The result of these efforts so far is that Plasma Duel is currently sitting at position three hundred and fourteen in the top new free "Arcade and Action" games on Google Play.  A "New Release" on Google Play is regarded as being any game released in the past thirty days and Plasma Duel is only ten days old, so there is still time for improvement.  What interests me is how the games that feature more highly on the chart have achieved their better ranking.  This is where things start to look a bit... odd.

Let's start right at the top.

The top "New Release" in the "Arcade and Action" category on Google Play right now is a game called "Temple Run Bunny".  It's been downloaded over a million times and is a nearly fifty megabyte download.  Let's be clear, this has no relation to Temple Run apart from being an almost exact clone.  it's basically game using stolen intellectual property,  The top reviews on the game are quite revealing about where all these downloads are coming from:

"Temple run for kids. It seems nice 5 stars for now until I play it may not be what I think it is lolz ;3"
"Good. I said three stars because I did not play it but I am going to I think it is going to be like temple run by the looks of it"
"Temple Bunny Run. Well I give it a star because its the lowest it will go for an app that cant even be allowed to be downloaded to begin with, just like temple run 2. fix that problem and i'll change it to five stars"

Those are just the top featured reviews, there are hundreds more by other players who haven't played or can't play the game.  All down the charts there are similar examples of games that either the reviewer seems to have been forced to download and review or the review is obviously auto-generated junk text.

This problem has been getting attention elsewhere as well.  Just take a look at this mammoth Reddit thread on the topic:  http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1vmjsl/holy_cow_look_at_all_these_fake_appsgames_on_the/

Google really need to do something about this.  It's the one thing that could push me away from developing for Android first.

Plasma Duel has been released!

I published the free and premium versions of Plasma Duel to production on New Years Eve so the game is now out there for everybody to play.

The next challenge for the game is visibility, there are over 500 games in the "top new arcade" category on Google Play - that's just the games released in the past 30 days.  Getting Plasma Duel anywhere near the top of that list will be a challenge.

My primary tactic to make some sort of impression on the charts is to take advantage of the current installed user base of Cherry Chaser and Super Snake.  I'm running a 100,000 house ads to the players of these games promoting Plasma Duel as a new game from the maker of the game they are playing.  I'm going to try to blitz those ads between now and Sunday to try to make an impression on the charts.

You can help me!

You can help me by giving Plasma Duel a rating on the Play Store.  If you enjoy the game please rate it and maybe give a few comments.  The ratings given to games influence their rankings quite heavily so every good rating I get will help me enormously at this stage.

Thanks to all who helped test the game, you rock!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.exobyte.plasmaduel&hl=en