A very exigent market for games

It has been almost four months since I published the first version of Egg Savior in the market. This game was mainly an experiment to learn a couple of new things. First of all, I wanted to learn how to develop games for the Android platform. Secondly, I wanted to learn how the market reacts to games. And finally, I wanted to learn how global apps perform, since OTempo, my former app, is a local app targeted to galician users.

For the first target, I am quite proud. The game performs quite well even on middle-end hardware like my old Galaxy Spica, and I was able to try graphics, sound and input. You can read my post on Creating 2D games with Android and Blender where I share some of my gathered knowledge.

About market reaction to games, I have learned a quite hard lesson: The market is very exigent, even with free games. Actually, I think that gamers don't care if your game is free or costs a couple of bucks, they expect a high quality product from the first version, and if the first version is not good enough, upgrading and enhancing it will not work like it would have done with other apps. Advertising has been very helpful on recognizing usage patterns on the first version and each upgrade.
I have to admit that this lesson was hard to fit, because I spent long hours working in this game, but sometimes one has to get back to planet earth and remember its objectives. It was a learning experience, and I have learned a lot. I realize that the artistic needs of the game far exceed my ability, and the number of levels is quite ridiculous, but it was not about fame and glory ;-)

About the global market, I also learned a valuable lesson. There is a lot of fragmentation. Every country behaves differently to this game. All the statistics that admob provides point to the fact that the usage pattern varies a lot from one country to another. The most obvious example is the case of Korea, where the game was a huge success, maintaining the first position in free games for several consecutive days. I believe that this is a great opportunity rather than a threat. It enables development of products with a strong personality, focused in a concrete market, and opens more opportunities for everyone. It also warns of the risk of starting a serious project (I mean, investing money) without any kind of market research.