When my brothers Brandon, Tyler, Steve, and I began working on Taptitude for Windows Phone back in early 2011, we never would have dreamed that we would find the kind of success that we have obtained now an entire year after release.
What started as a small collection of five mini-games has turned into one of the top games on Windows Phone, containing over 60 mini-games and receiving over 350,000 downloads.
Our hobby project evolved into a full-fledged business as we figured out how to monetise the ecosystem and we formed FourBros Studio toward the end of 2011.
I'd like to share my thoughts on how we got here, what worked, and what didn't in order to shed some light on the mobile gaming business.
Untapped potential
Taptitude was initially designed to be a small collection of very quick mini-games.
We knew from experience that by keeping the project's scope constrained we would be far more likely to actually ship the game. In addition to keeping the scope of the development time down, targeting small games allowed us to keep the scope of the gameplay to its bare minimum.
The initial set of Taptitude mini-games were designed to be played in less than 30 seconds, and replayability came from the competitive online leaderboards. This was a perfect fit for mobile gaming, where a player might only have a few minutes between meetings or while standing in line to enjoy the game.
Starting gun
With just five such mini-games, we shipped Taptitude: Volume 1 in March 2011.
Our initial idea was that we would ship a new volume of 5 games every month. Our first release showed promise with an initial burst of downloads and activity, but it quickly trailed off as the game fell off the New Arrivals list. This gave us the idea that we should try releasing these games individually, on a weekly basis, to maximise our exposure on the new arrival listing.
By the time we had 10 of these individual games released we realised that the whole collection was stronger than the sum of its parts.
Being able to play all of the games within one meta game was a great experience and we had a lot of ideas for Taptitude features that could cross-integrate the games.
Near the end of April, we released Taptitude as it is today, a single unified collection of mini-games. Rather than releasing a new game onto the marketplace every week, we decided to update Taptitude with a new mini-game and cross-integrating features every week.
One year later...
To our surprise, with each weekly update we got an even larger boost of new users than we were getting before from the New Arrivals listing.
The update would remind people to play the game, and that increased the chances of Taptitude being shared by word of mouth or being noticed over-the-shoulder. With such a frequent and regular cadence of updates, our users began to look forward to Taptitude Tuesday and the new game that awaited them each week.
Taptitude generates revenue from display ads served by pubCenter.
We did not know what to expect in terms of ad revenue since we had no prior experience with advertising. Our initial goal, for us to consider Taptitude a success, was $50 per day in revenue. For the first month, we were lucky to see $5 in a day. For our second month, we were excited to have finally broken $20 a day. It wasn't until our third month that we saw our first $50 day.
It can take a long time to build up a viable user base for ad revenue and I think with Taptitude we've shown that a game doesn't have to be a hit out of the gate, sometimes slow and steady wins you just have to stick with it.
We've continued to grow our usage with weekly updates and are now consistently making over $1,000 a day from ad revenue over a year after its original release.
Slow burn
Two of the biggest keys to Taptitude's success have been its bite-sized gameplay targeted at mobile gamers paired with weekly updates with new content to keep users coming back.
It's not the formula for an overnight success that many of the polish-heavy blockbuster titles might employ. Instead, it's a strategy for building, retaining, and monetising an ever growing user base.
Above all else, it has been our persistence that has allowed us to evolve Taptitude into a successful mobile game.
You can follow FourBros Studios's news via its blog and Twitter. And you can check out Taptitude here.
