Greetings!

The main purpose of this website is to support Android indie game developers with tutorials, reviews and promotion of their games. The main difficulty for the developers is not to make the game, but to get exposure. To get it out there. If you find anything useful here, please spread the word. Like my page on Facebook, follow me on Google+ or Twitter. Thank you!

Google+ Facebook Twitter

× close

Friday 25 October 2013

Giftiz Review Part II - A month after, good way to promote your app?


So here I am, a month after Giftiz featuring promotion started. The question is now, does Giftiz significantly increase you downloads? The answer is: yes, if your download numbers were very small.

I believe you can make decent money from ad supported game when you reach about 100.000 downloads in the first month based on other people's experience and my own humble beginnings. Giftiz gave me approximately 2300 downloads in a month - 2000 in the first five days.

This might be enough to generate initial interest. A spike in your downloads that will make Google Play store algorithm to notice you and show your game in the Top New Free games. Moreover 20% of these installs come from France. Giftiz is a French company after all. This will give you significant boost in French store.

But it's not good for anything else. The people coming from Giftiz might be able to generate about $10 - $20 revenue on AdMob. They install your game, play until they finish the mission and leave immediately afterwards.

Conclusion

Here is the final graph of daily installs and uninstalls. You can see that the first day of featuring the downloads skyrocketed, but so did uninstalls.



So what does that mean? When you get a free offer from Giftiz to be featured after your first month in the store, you are helping them more than they are helping you - they need your game. If you were to get the offer to be featured during your first month, go for it. Unless you are already seeing thousands of daily installs.

Including the Giftiz SDK is very simple, but there's another risk included - your game will partly depend on their SDK and their service.
 
Martin Varga is a Czech software developer who likes pygmy owls (hence Kulíš), running, ramen, travelling and living in foreign countries. He is also known as smartus or sm4 on the internet (read as smartass, but there are too many of them). He currently tries to make games in AndEngine like Mr. Dandelion's Adventures and hangs around a lot at the AndEngine forums.