In opposition to what I believe is a good starting point to found a mobile games studio, the low cost of entry to self-publish on mobile platforms combined with the accessibility of game engines such as Unity, seems to have made the hypercasual market incredibly competitive.
While I had always self-published my work, I was unaware of the exact metrics that publishers use to determine ad-scalable hits. Despite my experience in the UK games industry, I found it challenging to find a good publishing partner, especially in the competitive hypercasual space.
To find a publisher, I first reached out to 30 mobile game publishers from a list that contained many of the major publishers but was far from complete and quite outdated (https://gamedev.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-publisher-to-publish). Out of those 30 publishers, I received only four responses within a week: Kwalee, Voodoo, Homa Games, and SayGames. I wanted to work with a responsive studio, so this was my first filter.
Kwalee, Voodoo, and Homa Games all have automatic publishing platforms that allow you to pitch your prototypes and collect data on their performance. From a pure engineering perspective, it is necessary to have a team member with mobile development experience to be able to resolve a variety of configuration issues when integrating the required dependent advertising and analytics platforms.
My journey started with Kwalee since they are based locally for me in Leamington Spa. However, I was put in contact with their business development manager in Bangalore, which reduced this benefit.
I faced compatibility issues when attempting to integrate my game with the Kwalee publishing platform and needed to start from a blank template on an exact Unity build to create a successful build.
Ultimately, my proof of concept game was rejected because it didn’t match anything at the top of the Play Store charts. This frustrating experience led me to rule out Kwalee as a publisher since the relationship seemed to dilute my creative control down to ‘copy what is currently successful’.
Next, I worked on integrating the Voodoo publishing package into another game that was created by our outsourcing team. While the process was equally painful to integrate with my game as the Kwalee package, the Voodoo publishing platform is more mature and includes useful step-by-step tips with screenshots for issues you might face as you go along.
These screenshots however did not warn me of two issues that took days to resolve:
- Gradle versions can be specified differently in each Android plugin and the build system makes a call on whether to allow the build to succeed. This compatibility led to me standardizing Gradle versions across all the plugins in the Voodoo packages and my packages which took a while to resolve since this has a knock-on impact on compatible Android SDK levels, NDK levels, available build-tool levels, and Java versions! Once I found a functioning set, I intend to use this as a magic template set until there is an issue. I think it would have been very useful for known compatible versions of these platform dependencies to be included in the Voodoo Publishing Platform process.
- Hidden post-build changes to Android manifests (IPostGenerateGradleAndroidProject, AssetPostprocessor). For an Android build, you can specify multiple manifest files which are necessary to have the correct permissions for published builds. Not only do multiple Unity plugins provide their own manifest to add to the mix (which Gradle handles quite gracefully, and removes duplicates), but they also manually parse the file using the above hooks, and alter them. Faults caused by manual alterations (such as duplications) are not picked up by Gradle but instead cause an error, because all the manifests to be merged must themselves be valid manifests. I manually overrode this behavior and formed my own unified manifest builder to overcome this issue.
We set our build live for ‘SATELLITE CLICKERS’ (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.localhostlimited.IdleSpaceSatellites), created the marketing materials, and ran the first advertising test campaign.
The first attempt at testing my game’s performance did not meet their criteria, but they allow for iterations so you can re-submit once you are happy with your changes. To be continued!
In the end, I learned that the market is currently very saturated, so it is incredibly challenging to stand out. The game needs to be both a simple concept with mass-market appeal but also novel enough to stand out.
Nonetheless, my experience taught me the importance of improving publisher-critical statistics such as ‘Cost Per Install (CPI)’ and ‘Day 1 Retention (D1 RET).’ While publishers offer advice on improving these metrics, Voodoo’s ‘Academy’ is the most comprehensive learning tool that I have encountered. The Voodoo platform provided me with valuable advice and a learning tool in their ‘Academy.’ They structure their videos into smaller chunks like other e-learning platforms, and this made the content more accessible than the longer conference talks on the Kwalee-equivalent ‘coaching’ platform.
The thresholds for KPIs that interest publishers enough to take a project further are openly discussed by developers on these platforms and having these goals to aim for means you have a greater focus on what is important during the development cycle and how to improve your chances of winning this game development lottery!
Thanks for reading my post, check out our other projects at https://localhostlimited.com/works
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