I released upigo on the 19th of November not knowing what to expect. I had been holding out on release with the thought of making it as good as possible before launching it. This is something that sounds pretty obvious but goes against a lot of people’s opinion especially when it come to a first game. The rational is that you have to get it out of the way and move on to your second one where you can apply what you’ve learned through the process.
I don’t disagree with this idea but I ignored it for a long time. That was until 3 weeks ago. I had gotten to a point where upigo finally felt like a game. Not perfect, and there were many things I wanted to add/change, but at least I had something I could call a game. In the end what pushed me to release the game was my sanity. I was going a bit crazy working full time on the same project for more than a year with no idea what to expect. I had to get it out of the way.
upigo on the App Store
On release there was no big celebration. 14 months of work led to a Tuesday morning with my video trailer, a few social media posts and 100 mail sent. Over the year I had imagined all kinds of outcomes but in my case it was the most likely outcome. A very tame release. About 200 players in the 3 weeks after launch.
Looking at the revenue from apple and google, all this work is currently worth about $5. That is $0.24 from people clicking on ads, and $5 from some someone who purchased a micro-transaction. I feel it might be a friend or family doing it out of pity. or by accident.. But thank you. 🙂
I can’t make any conclusion yet as it is a work in progress and to tell you the truth, I stopped marketing the game quickly after release. Not because I gave up, but the release itself has gotten me a lot more attention from people around me with some friends spending a significant amount of time in my game and giving me some valuable feedback. The release turned out to be a success in a way I did not anticipate.
The plan now is straight forward. Keep doing what I was doing, but with a new outside perspective. I will be adding minor features and polishing existing ones. I hope to lock down most feature in the next couple of months to slowly focus on creating content.
I don’t like promising things due to my shady record of keeping deadlines, but I will try to update monthly with improvements and at least one new world. To show I’m committed, I’m releasing my first update today. It fixes a few things, adds language support and most importantly adds a new world called Snowfall.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
