About One Month Ago: Downloads, Earnings, and More

So about one month ago I finally published my game Pixel Tribe, and many have been asking how many downloads it has and how much money it has actually made so far. In this video, we're gonna go through that and also a bit about how the launch actually went, and I was in no way prepared for this.

Downloads

First of all, if you haven't tried Pixel Tribe yet, the link is in the description below, so feel free to test it out and let me know what you think.

So let's first look at the downloads. The first couple of days after the launch, things actually started quite slow, and based on everything I've seen in other devlogs, I kinda expected the first couple of days to have the most downloads, and then things would go down after that. And as you can see here, I only got a couple of hundred downloads the first days, and since I expected things to go down, I was honestly kind of sad it didn't do better. But what I've seen from others have mainly been Steam games because apparently things aren't quite like that for mobile, like at all. Because although I expected things to go down over the next few days, the numbers just kept going up and up and up, and now after just one month, we have over 100,000 people actually playing the game, which is freaking crazy.

Earnings

So now probably what most of you are interested in, how much money has the game actually earned?

Let's start with the ads. In one month, the Unity ads have earned the game a total of one thousand five hundred dollars, which is really good since the ads are completely optional in the game.

Next up are the actual in-app purchases, like the gem packs, and this has honestly been crazy. So if we combine the earnings from both Google Play and the App Store, the game has earned a total of $21,300 in one month, which is absolutely insane. But I don't get all of this money because, of course, Google Play and Apple both take their cuts of 15%. And once I get the rest, I gotta pay taxes on that as well.

Before we get too excited about all this money, we have to look at the expenses as well. I basically quit my job just to work on this full-time for an entire year, and that meant that I had to spend a total of $25,000 of my own savings just to pay my bills and still live a little during this period. And also this last month, I've spent everything the game has earned into more marketing, so I basically spent a total of twenty thousand dollars on marketing as well this last month. But all of this means that even if we don't account for the money I could have earned if I had a regular job, we're still at a negative $22,200. So one can see that the money isn't exactly life-changing at this point, but just having so many people actually play and enjoy the game has still been an amazing experience. And the goal now is just to keep updating the game and making it even better to keep players happy and keep the download numbers up.

But anyways, it's completely crazy that over a hundred thousand people have played the game, and there has been so much positive feedback and negative, but we'll get to that. And with all the positive reviews I've gotten this month, I've been absolutely amazed. But with all the new players, all the feedback, all the emails, the reviews, the DMS, the bug reports, the crash reports, and so much more, the biggest problem is actually keeping up with everything. This is fine. I've literally been drowning in things to do and in no way had enough time to answer everyone that has messaged me. And that feels especially awful when I know people get game-breaking bugs. For example, one of the most game-breaking bugs was how on some specific phones, people's save files got corrupted over and over again, which of course became very frustrating to them and led to a ton of bad reviews.

The last month has basically been trying to fix problems like this, helping people out with account issues, responding to emails, DMS, bug reports, and so on while also trying to add new stuff to the game. Because this month, I've also added some new decorations like sunflowers, bees, and honey, and some food that uses honey. I've also added fermenting barrels and a brewery where you can make alcohol that are basically foods that also give your Vikings different buffs for 24 hours. I've also done a lot of rebalancing, like changing how healing works, quest XP, and much, much more. And I've also implemented a server time in the game because so many people have been changing their device clock to make things go faster, which have led to a ton of other bugs like new board orders not showing up or the trader not leaving and much, much more.

The last month has been really, really chaotic but extremely exciting at the same time, and I'm so thankful to all of you that have played and supported the game. You are freaking amazing, and I will do my absolute best to keep improving the game. The goal going forward now is actually adding more online features to the game like a friend list, some clans maybe, and some PVP. So if you have any ideas on what this should look like, let me know. So stay tuned, there's a lot of exciting things yet to come, and thank you all so much for watching and have a wonderful day!