Should I put ads on my mobile game during launch day? Learn from our mistake.

It’s every game dev’s dream to make money off of their games. One of the most common ways to do this is to put ads on your game. Excited, we decided to launch Color Jiggle with banner and occassional video ads.

It’s been almost a year since we’ve launched our mobile puzzle game: “Color Jiggle”.

This is what happened:

We got bad ratings

No gamer is happy when they see ads on the game they’re playing; especially when it’s a video popup when they just want to play another level. You might even tick one customer off enough to rate your game 1 star on the app store. (yes it happened to us)

Our users were more likely to leave than stay

When we posted our game on different social media platforms, we got around 200 users in a few months. Imagine you’re one of those users, but when you open the app, you see this ad on the bottom of your screen.

As a user, you may think, “Wow. I downloaded your game but now you throw an ad in my face as thanks?”. Not happy.

Out of those 200 users, only 3 people have followed us on facebook and twitter. We did a terrible job in giving a good first impression by shoving ads in our users faces. To be honest, those users may not even consider downloading a game from “Molla Games” ever again because of this.

Summary

If you’re a startup game dev group who is about to launch their new game, don’t put ads on it. Since you’re just starting out, you want to keep as much of your users to build a community. Even if you have a great game idea, people will not like your company for putting ads on it. If you are wondering how to make money, consider moving to patreon where your users can show their appreciation by donating to your development journey. Putting ads on your game is really only effective once you’ve gained a substantially large userbase.

Learned from our mistake? If you want more tips from our mistakes, follow our twitter. See you next time! 🙃

While you’re at it, you can download Color Jiggle here