Back to Business – Review from Metal Frenzy

by | Jul 3, 2017 | Allgemein | 0 comments

Hey everyone,

today I have something different for you: A short review from the Metal Frenzy 2017 combined with our experience in promoting FlatFatCat.

Metal music and game development does this fit?

As usual in the summer time we visited the Metal Frenzy festival. It is a metal festival in Germany Gardelegen. Of course vacation as an indie developer is always a problem as long as you don’t earn of money for it, so I thought about a way to promote FlatFatCat even on the festival and spend some hours. The result: We printed a lot of cool flyers and contacted the festival organisation. We got the ok that we could lay out our flyers at the entrance (Big thanks to Robert) and we were able to spread them on the camping ground. Unfortunately the Metal Frenzy isn’t the biggest festival, however we wanted to try it at least. Here you can see our flyer:

 

FlatFatCat

 

Feedback from Metal Frenzy 2017

I got a lot of very cool feedback from everyone. It was always the same sequence: You tried to offer someone a flyer or two and everyone was first skeptical. As soon as we could speak some words everyone changed their mind and were very kindly and willing to support us.

What this meant for me: As soon as you can tell your story mostly everyone is interested. If you just hand out the flyer no one will care about it. This is actual the same feeling I have with all of my marketing on going. When you try to just announce your game to the press or reviewers no one is giving a fuck. But if you have the chance to tell your story or why you would need support – you will have a lot better chances to get support. I have no idea why this is so – maybe everyone thinks you can develop games and you are already a rich guy or something. As an indie developer with a small budget: I just can say – No! We have the hardest time to promote or distribute our games.

As summary of course the festival is just some days ago, but we could see some increased downloads and we got a lot of cool questions and feedback. So I say it was a cool promoting attempt even if it was the most successful one. It took us just some hours to get to every camp and spread the flyers. I would do it again if I have the chance for it.

Metal Frenzy

Back to business

I have the feeling FlatFatCat is in an good state at the moment. With the update 1.4 we introduced all mandatory features to have a really cool game out there. However there is a lack of downloads and players. But at this point I don’t have any option to make more or better marketing, because I have no clue how? I tried most likely everything what I could read in Blogs and my results are really really devastating. I spend hours of hours in SEO / ASO / Twitter / Facebook / Blogging / Mailing the press and could generate 2 Reviews / 1 press announcement and in total maybe 50 Downloads for more than a week of work. I am not really sure what I do wrong or why I don’t get any audience, maybe at the end I don’t know my audience, the mobile market is too hard or I have a bad game. On the other hand that marketing stuff eats a lot of work time and I don’t get the results I hope for.

So whats the next attempt?

I try to spend my hours in thing I am good at or at least think I am good at 🙂 With my last budget I will introduce Timbertales, our first game, into steam. We got greenlight some time ago and I haven’t had the time yet to implement steam. I want to do this step for different reasons:

  • I want to make the experience with the steam API and libGDX
  • I think Timbertales is worth a bit more attention from my side
  • There are is a big audience on steam I can hope for

There will be some changes to the steam version of Timbertales. I decided to go with a fixed prize and delete all the in game purchase stuff for steam. I think a fixed price fits much better on steam than any free to play concept.

Can we expect another game?

After the steam integration of Timbertales is done, I will have to make some cash again. At the moment it not seems that Timbertales or FlatFatCat will help me surviving. I have some other options, but haven’t decided yet, which one will be the best for me. But I always want to make games and I don’t want to drop my independent state yet – So yes! there will be more games and there will be updates for the current games FlatFatCat and Timbertales. We also thinking about a reskinned version of FlatFatCat – Maybe FlatFatDog 🙂

If you have any questions or feedback don’t hesitate to comment below! 🙂

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