Doing products is different from doing business. It is a hard target for new person who don’t have experience in the business. If you have been working as a software engineer for the past 12 years and want to do business, it becomes harder than ever.
When I decided to do gaming business, my first thought was about the product and never thought about what I am discussing in this blog. I got to know the importance of dividing the teams after spending 8 months on my startup journey.
This information may not be useful to the people who already have business experience but it helps the person who wants to execute their ideas but has no knowledge on gaming business.
I am sharing my knowledge here. If it helps even one person, I am so happy.
My Experience:
I spent more than 12 years on product development. So I am able to build the product irrespective of platform and language but I did not gain business knowledge during my career. I thought that product knowledge was enough to take my product to the end users.
You know – startup journey is the same as roller coaster journey. We can not see anything clearly and at the same time we reach the point without understanding what happened in the journey.
I started coding the Ludo Family game, drawing graphics. Meanwhile I am doing testing also so it is throwing huge bugs. Due to bug fixing I lose contrasting on graphics. Immediately I started concentrating on graphics and then I lost focus on the marketing side. These things are followed one after another. At the end my life became hell. Still I am ok to bear the pain but my product quality went bad. This is painful to me.
I understand that I have to balance all these works. So that we can understand where we need to spend more time as well as where It is going bad. Also we can find out a piece of work to assign to another person. I divided the teams as follows.
Business Team – Here the team concentrate on design business mode and monetisation strategies. Mainly working on below topics.
How do we make money?
How do we motivate players to spend their money?
How to create desire to purchase items from games?
Product Team – This team concentrates on product development and Testing.
Design/Develop product
Implement monetization strategies
QA – Achieve product quality
Fixing product issues.
PQJ (Product Quality Judgement) – we send the final product to a group of people who are never involved in product design/development and ask for their true opinion about the product.
Finance Team – This team takes care about founding and Calculate ROI
Takes care about capital money
Design money investment strategies
Analysis on how many active users we need to get the profit.
Analyze campaigns based on ROAS.
Marketing team – Concentrate on Marketing our product in different areas
Decide User Acquisition Strategies
Design marketing content for different social medias
Define different campaigns based on product segmentation.
Choose social media based on our product.
These are the teams I have noted down so far I am sure this information is going to change when we get experience. Please write your opinion on this topic and also always welcome your suggestions.
These games started earning money after so many days. We were so happy but one day we got mail that Admob is going to stop providing ads for our games and then suspended my admob account after 30 days.
The top 3 reasons to get our admob account suspended
Policy Violation
Associated with another account
Invalid Traffic or Activities
1. Policy Violation
Admob has a list of policies. Strictly we have to follow all these policies. Admob is always checking our game after a period of time. If we violate any policy, Admob raises policy violations.
This is a very straightforward way. Admob clearly mentions the violated policy name. We can correct it in our game. So there are very few chances for us to suspend our Admob account.
2. Associated with another account
Admob is very smart. If we have more admob accounts, it identifies and suspends our Admob account. It is always suggestable, don’t create multiple Admob accounts.
3. Invalid Traffic or Activities
This is the most dangerous one. Admob never keeps any one to check whether an Android App is getting valid traffic or not. Admob uses an algorithm to validate our app traffic. If an app gets clicks from the same network IP multiple times, Admob treats the traffic is invalid.
The possible way to get invalid traffic are as below
Self Clicking on ads by publishers
Hire someone to click on ads
Repeated Clicks by a set of Users
Using automated tools to increase impressions
Third-party traffic services to increase impressions
Admob gives more importance to advertisers than publishers. If an app gets invalid traffic, advertisers’ purpose never fulfill and it causes them to lose faith on Admob ad marketing. admob wants his business but not developer work and time.
The worst thing here is we lose our admob account without our involvement also. It happens so many times to so many developers. Admob never gives any clue to find out from where we got the invalid traffic. Most of the time we fail and google wins in this game.
Admob stops displaying ads on our games for 30 days. We have to find out the root cause of Invalid Traffic and then we need to appeal to google in these 30 days.
Solutions
I noted down two solutions from my experience. It may help you also. If you know more options. Feel free to comment on it.
Keep one eye on your traffic – Write a logic to capture the user traffic information. Firebase is the best option.
Control the user clicks on Ads – Write a logic in our app to count the user clicks on ads and limit him like 5 clicks per a week. Use a mobile local database to track the clicks count and don’t show the ads to him once he crossed the clicks limit.
Go with alternatives – The last option is looking for an alternative to admob. Appbroda is one of the best ad provider. But They have a set of rules. Once you applied, they monitored our app and then replied back to us.
This is what I want to share with you friends. I am still analyzing this case and will update this blog whenever I get a new update on this topic.
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Do you know the best board game? Do you know which board game is played by most people? Do you know people spend most of their time playing board games? In fact knowingly or unknowingly you also spent your time on board games. If you want to know about the most popular board game then you are in the right place. Here we discuss games and know the starting point of board games along with statistics.
Nowadays, High level games are available in the market. Those games have rich graphics, good sound quality and animation. We can easily download on our mobile and play the game anywhere. Even though we can not avoid the board game. Board games are not only for entertainment. It triggers our left side brain to think logically. Smart moves and decision taking nature plays an important role in board games. Game designers always keep this point while designing board games. We have different board games. Ludo is the most popular board game these days. As per survey most of the people are showing interest in the Ludo game.
We can see the discussion of board games in most of the civilizations. Ancients treated the board game as daily activity. They invited friends to play board games. Many times friends turned into enemies at the end of the board games. It leads to misunderstandings and wars. As per the records Pachakalu (Pachasi) Senet, Hounds and Jackals were the oldest board games. Ludo is inspired by those games. Four players are required to play Ludo. Now the Ludo is available for six players also.
Pachasi, nowadays we call Ludo, is discussed in Mahabharat. The die is little bit changed when we compare pachasi and Ludo. Pachasi die is modified by square cube die and Patented as Ludo in England in 1896. As per the history, Ludo(Pachasi) was created in India in the sixth century CE. You can find the clear sign of the legacy of the Ludo game in caves of Ellora.
Analytics says that 80 mobile phones out of 100 mobiles have Ludo games. The Ludo game has experienced significant growth from 1990. The popular British daily newspaper The Guardian described board games as “Making a comeback”. Now we are all witnessing the success of the board game Ludo. This growth was raised by 40% from 2010 to 2014. A 1991 survey says that the global board game market was over $1.2 billion. The recent survey in 2021, it crossed $1500 million. All these statistics clearly say how people are interested in board games.
Nowadays, Ludo is available in video game format also. So we can download it and play with friends where we want. Ludo king is the most popular video game. The only issue with mobile games is the memory availability. Now the mobile is not only for calling. It is useful for knowledge gain, business activities and fulfilling all our daily needs. We can not remove the apps every time and reinstall them. The only solution, our apps should be available in less memory so that we can keep all our important apps. Here I can suggest one Ludo game app Ludo Family:Ashta Chamma, it is available in 11M. It is the best suitable Ludo game app for the people who are concerned with mobile memory. It supports playing with friends as well as playing with computers. It has very simple graphics and game play. I am sure you will enjoy this app.
I hope this blog helps you to gain knowledge on Ludo games. Please feel free to write your option on this blog so that I can improve my blogging. You can write your comment, suggestions on this blog. I will touch your heart with another blog. Thank you.
You are here, which means you want to know about gameroost. Before I start talking about the gameroost, I want to thank you heart-fully because you are showing interest to know my story, to know my footsteps from nothing to gameroost. I really appreciate you and I make this blog to inspire you to start what you want to do.
I strongly believe that what we are today is because of the acts we did yesterday. All our bad/good incidents decide our path. So many times, little words may become a strong foundation for great achievements. Sometimes, our bad habits turn into our passion. The people who we meet in our life may leave their influence on us.
The stone which do not have any value:
The gameroost started from my career journey experience. It is very difficult to narrate the gameroost without touching on my journey. So I will tell you the most important incidents which motivated me to start gameroost. I did my MCA in 2010 and then started looking for jobs. I got a job in August in one of the established gaming company. I don’t remember who said this line that “The first company is the best company in our life” and It is true also. Now I have 11 years experience in the IT industry. I did not find a better company than the first one. It taught me how to be and should not be in IT companies.
Just Imagine the man who comes from the family, even one person from the entire family does not pass the 10th class exam, who studied in government school. Suddenly he started experiencing the corporate software industry culture. Still I remember the first time I experienced the central AC, office chair and my own desk. The people were new to me, their talks were new to me. I just started observing them. As a result, I sophisticated myself. I completed 2 and half years by just understanding the software culture.
I started to be one of these so-called software people. I went to pubs once a quarter. Chit chats with colleagues at launch time, tea time and walk after launch time. I thought this company was enough for me to meet my requirements by that time. I did not think about changing the company. All of a sudden one day, I still remember that day. I carried my box and kept it on my desk. My colleagues and I went for a tea break. People around me started talking about the one serious issue about the company. I did not believe that and I neglected it as a rumor. But HR came at 1PM and confirmed that the company is going to shut down and clearly mentioned that you are not an employee from now onwards. Everything is blank. I reached my home with a launch box and remained as a stone which did not have any value.
The brightness of light in dark room
It took almost three days to believe that the company got shut down.I believed that the company would remain until the end of my life. But all of the sudden everything changed. My colleagues used to call every day for the first week. Those calls also reduced day by day. All left from me. After a few days, I realized that I need to start everything from zero level and then started applying for jobs. I got a new job after two months. But this two months journey means a lot in my life. Accidently I saw one quotation from Infosys narayana sir that “LOVE YOUR JOB, BUT NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR COMPANY BECAUSE WE NEVER KNOW WHEN THE COMPANY STOPS LOVING YOU”. This quotation changed my view on the IT industry.
In this period I struggled a lot for money and it taught me the importance of having our own side-hussle. Then I started writing my own games. I know how to program the logic but I don’t know what challenges I will get in this journey. So the actual journey in my life started now.
My first success is the biggest failure in my game development journey
I just started developing games for the android platform at the beginning. I chose a very well known game “Mario” as my first game. Luckily I got Mario game images and sound files on the internet and I downloaded it. I started the Mario program and it finished in only a week. I published a game with the name “Tough and Funny Mario” in the android play store. Still I remember that day, I published it around 7PM and I checked it in the next day. It got 2000 downloads. I was very happy that day. “Tough and Funny Mario” got around 1,50,000 downloads in a month. It was a big surprise to me. So far everything is going on very well. But one day I got mail from Google Play store. This particular email gave me another challenge. All of a sudden my happiness took u-turn.
The mail says that Google is stopping publishing your “Tough and Funny Mario” game because of mis-using the Mario properties. The actual story is that the Mario game owner filed a case on my game because my Mario version got more downloads than their Mario game. This is very strange right. I didn’t even expect that my game was going to hit the market. But It gave competition to the actual Mario game which I played so many times in my childhood. I laughed and took it as one of my achievements in my life.
But the point is, by that time I did not know anything about the policy violations and the terms & conditions. I thought good programming is enough to publish our game except that I did not think about anything. Now I started learning about the violations and different programming languages to make our games for different platforms.
If we don’t have passion, we can’t fight for a long time. Because the journey is very tough and we quit when the problem is in front of you.
I have been improving my skills from 8 years onwards. My wife joined along with me. We both shared our responsibilities. We faced many setbacks in this 8 years period. Sometimes we thought our gaming was going to hit the market but it did not happen. Sometimes we started earning the money from our product but it got unpublished after a while because of some unknown policy violations. But we never think to give up our trial. Everytime we are studying about our mistakes and start correcting them and preparing the games. We improved graphics, marketing knowledge. We started publishing flash games, facebook games and HTML5 games. We have plans to publish games for the IPhone market in the upcoming years. Now two members are working for gameroost. We want to improve this count in future. We know this journey is tough but we never give up because it is our passion.
This is all about gameroost. I want to keep it as short as possible. I hope it inspires you. I am requesting you please visit gameroost.com and games which are in the android play store. If you like any game, please download it. I keep most of my games free and occupy very less memory. Finally leave your comment or suggestions about this blog. Thank you.
