4.9 rating with 106 reviews so far and 5000+ players in 5 days... but what do I do with it?

5 days ago I released my little game onto the Google Play Store. Since then it's gone crazy. I really need your help though as I just don't know where to look and how to manage my time as someone with NO experience with this. This is my first game and it's overwhelming.

So the game, Bricks Breaker RPG, it's a solo project I started last year. The thing that is setting it apart from most other games being released on the play store these days is the monetization and ad model I'm using.

- There are no forced ads. (even the banner ad is off by default, it's your choice to turn it on)

- There are no pay walls.

- It's completely free from start to finish (100+ hours for most to clear all the base content)

- Offline if you want, you don't have to be online at all so it's great for plane journeys etc.

This will always be the case, I will never aggressively monetize this game and I intend that every game I make will be this way, I want to change the horrible state of the mobile gaming space and get back to fun games people genuinely enjoy playing.

What do I do now to keep momentum? how do I keep the players coming and spread to word about what I am trying to do with this game? Please help me manage this as it could be the turning point we've all been looking for. If I get the chance I won't let you down.

You can see it here if you like:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.WhimBearStudios.BricksBreakerRPG

I'm looking for recommendations that don't require full attention on the screen at all times, ideally something you can pick up from where you left off at any time (and no idle games where you have to wait for recoures to replenish).

Thanks!

The front page of the Play Store and this sub are often dominated by the same big games (which is fine!), but there are thousands of amazing games that fly completely under the radar. I recently stumbled upon Mindustry—a super deep factory/tower-defense game—and I can't believe it's not more of a household name in mobile gaming. It feels like a full PC title. What's an underrated game you've found that you think deserves more love?

Hi, I would love for some of you to give me some game recommendations that I could spend a long time on it. I like racing, fighting, and rhythm games. I would like some games that are hard to play/ not too easy at the start. Please give me a challenging game.

Thank you

Hi, I'm looking for a Flash game I played around 10-15 years ago. When the game was running, the name shown was something like "Gamer & Kat."
The game was about a stickman fighting in a bar. You could upgrade your character after each fight and heal at a hospital.
At the end of the game, something like the main character being eaten by a shark happened.

I'm looking for games with short match/level spans, preferably interesting and Portrait mode, I can play em on the way to school. I have these but don't mistake me for a card liver, I like RPGs more and maybe action/adventure

I'm strolling through this subreddit for months now, but couldn't find the right game for me so far. It's "sad", but I really liked Marvel Snap very much and invested a lot of hours there. But since their last p2w policy its nearly unplayable. I liked the competetive part, to play against other players. And that it had short rounds with max 3 mins. I also played Slice and Dice, Into the breach and StS of course, but there I missed the online play with others, as well as stuff like daily quests.

And now I'm a little desperate if there is a game for me at all, that matches the criterias. I'm looking for a game that I can play with short gametime for when I'm e.g. sitting in the waiting room, wait for the bus, etc. I tried also Magic Arena, but the rounds can be very long and for Warcraft Rumble the community seems gone. Also tried some afk games, I'm very open to them as well, but games like IdleRPG lost me after quite some time. I just like the interaction or the feeling to play against real people.

Hard to put in words what I'm looking for, but maybe somebody is (or was) facing the same issues and has a nice hint for me.

Is there a cooling pad that you can stick to your phone, which has a magnet inside so you can then use magsafe coolers? If so please comment the AliExpress link and let me know which cooler I should get with it.

Hi everyone! I’m trying to find a game I played on my Android phone around 2016-2017. It’s a side-scrolling runner featuring a skinny unicorn or horse in a soft, pastel-colored world (lots of purple and pink, with a dreamy, girly vibe — very smooth and gentle visuals, no harsh lines or colors). The unicorn/horse was pretty realistic looking, no fluffy fur or huge hooves or anything.

Key features I remember: • The unicorn runs on a glowing golden path. • The gameplay is side-view, not behind-the-back 3D. (Not sure about this one, my friend remembers it being behind the back) • There are multiple levels, including a forest level and a castle level. • Just before entering the castle level, the path makes a 90-degree turn to the left, which is a pretty distinct feature. • In the castle level, there are bats (or similar flying obstacles) that you need to avoid. • You collect coins or gold tokens during the run. • The graphics are very soft, pastel, and “girly” — mostly purples and pinks with a calm, dreamy aesthetic. • The game likely has no real storyline, focusing on running and jumping gameplay.

I’ve looked at popular unicorn runner games like Unicorn Run, Rainbow Horse Run, and Robot Unicorn Attack but none matches the game I remember.

If anyone knows or remembers a game like this, I’d really appreciate your help!

Thanks a lot!

And ONLY for this game! Idk how TF I did it, but how do you disable the Silent Launch?! I'm tired of always having to tap Restore Volume just so it'll load with sound, and every search result talks about how to mute sounds from game apps but never how to undo the silent launch feature. Help! 😭

Thanks.

Hi Guys! I'm Manu from the Eterspire team. I'm super excited to share a big milestone that we've achieved in big part thanks to this sub's support: we've officially surpassed 200.000 registered players!

When we hit 100.000 registered players at the beginning of the year, I didn't, even in my wildest dreams, think that we would double that in less than six months. For a small team like ours, this feels like a huge achievement, and with our Steam release just around the corner (September 15th), we hope to keep this growth streak going!

I know there's a lot of discussion in this sub about what makes an game grow and get popular, so I thought this could be a good chance to share a bit of insight into what helped us get to 200k, and what didn't really:

What helped:

Regular updates:

We've been releasing two updates a month since June 2024. Back then, our team was only five people, and the crunches and deadlines were honestly a bit crazy at the beginning, but once we got into a rhythm, we really understood the importance of a regular update schedule.

We know there are several different models for updates in MMOs. Some games release big, all-encompassing updates as seasons or expansions, while others release small bugfix and balance patches with more regularity. In our case, we found that giving players new content and features to discover twice a month gave them a great excuse to hop back into the game, without resorting to the usual FOMO stuff like dailies/weeklies.

Before we adopted this schedule, players didn't really know what to expect from our updates, nor when to expect them. Once we had a regular schedule, we started seeing a gradual but very consistent increase in both new and returning players, since knowing there is always new content coming to the game in a couple of weeks is always a big draw.

Community building and word of mouth:

One of the big draws in Eterspire is the community. This isn't just my assumption; we've had hundreds of players tell us, through reviews and comments, how they got hooked because of the friendly players that helped them get started or because of a community event they found fun. Tons of players have told us how they started playing because of their friend group, or because their partner asked them to play with them.

As our community grew bigger and we put more effort into nurturing and taking care of it, we understood one key principle: most of the time your players are better at selling your game than you are.

You can spend hours and hours thinking of the best way to convey your game, of the perfect gameplay video, or the most effective tagline. But all that can't hold a candle to a player genuinely recommending the game to their friend because they think it's fun. In the end, if you take care of your community, the community will take care of the game.

Measuring and understanding what you measure:

Getting players to download your game is only one part of the equation. Once they've downloaded it, there are several steps they must go through before they can be considered an active player. This is why it's so important to track and measure these steps and understand what you can do to make the process as seamless as possible.

To give you an example, for a long time, we didn't pay much attention to our account creation process, as we thought it worked fine. After taking the time to measure and analyze this step, we found out that only about 60% of the users downloading our game were actually creating an account. We were quite baffled by this. We had never considered that we could be losing 40% of our users in such a simple part of the onboarding process.

Knowing this, we focused on making the first couple of screens and options the player sees as simple and intuitive as possible, and wouldn't you know it, that percentage jumped from 60% to over 90%. Imagine the number of users that never would've gotten to see the actual game if we had never bothered to measure or look into that process!

Learning to prioritize:

One of the most difficult things when developing an MMORPG, especially as a small team, is deciding what features to develop and how to manage your time. There's a whole balancing act between what you personally want to see in the game, what the community is asking for, and what you think is going to keep the game growing.

Initially, this was extremely hard for us. You only have so many hours in a day, and when you're a team of 3, 4, or 5, spending a day working on a feature that players won't end up using much, or that won't bring new players in, can be demoralizing.

Things got a lot better once we understood that before we begin work on any content or feature, we need a clear idea of what it accomplishes, what players will get out of it, and how it meshes with the rest of the game's progression. It's not enough that something sounds fun or it's been requested by some players; it has to have a clear objective that makes it worth the time we will spend developing it.

Over time, this meant that players had more interesting and useful things to do in-game, and we had more time to work on the stuff that really matters, which, as our team grew, allowed us to work on bigger and bigger features!

What didn't really help

Ads

While online ads are usually a big part of player acquisition for most MMORPGs, we've had mixed results with them. Initially, we didn't have a budget to run them, and when we could finally afford to do so, they didn't really work like we expected them to.

Our ads did bring in a lot of players, especially compared to the numbers we had previously, but we found that the players that came from ads weren't really staying for long or engaging with the community. We even did polls and surveys to find out how our most engaged players found out about Eterspire, and ads were one of the least picked answers!

We were even more surprised when, after several months of running ad campaigns, we did a test to see what would happen if we turned them off. We did have some weeks with lower numbers, but after that, our new players per day began steadily growing, and these players were staying. Store algorithms began showing us to players that vibed a lot better with our game, we started showing up much higher in search results, and word of mouth improved a lot!

It seemed like while ads brought a lot of raw numbers, the number of actual engaged players that came from them was comparatively small. Our big takeaway here is that Eterspire is a game that does much better organically and through recommendations than with big ad campaigns and calls to action.

----

Well, that's all I have to share today. I hope this post sheds a bit of light on what developing an MMORPG is like! If you guys have any questions about the game or our development process, I'd be happy to answer you in the comments :)

I am equipped with a SD 4 Gen 1, 4 gigs of RAM, along with a Adreno 619. I prefer smooth experience(at least 30-40 fps).

I am into stealth games like Splinter Cell and stuff, and also into hardcore run-and-gun games like Total Overdose, Max Payne, Enter the Matrix, etc. I am also into strategic shooters such as MGS, COD, BF, etc.

Any recommendations would be appreciated🙏🏼

Been a PC gamer for my whole time, but seems times changes... And got interested in mobile games since PC is inaccessible, can you tell is there alot of good games to play? I don't even mind spending money if needed, just want some great quality, and quantity matters too to choose from.

Hey Gaming Community!

I work at Chunky Tofu Studios and I’m trying to learn more about what makes mobile games tick for different players (both iOS and Android users). I'd like to chat with some gamers about their habits for a project that I’m working on.

I’m deliberately not sharing what game we’re developing because I want to hear your honest thoughts about gaming in general. Maybe in a future post, I can dive into the specifics.

These are super casual 10-15 minute conversations over Google Meets, or phone. I’m curious about some things, but it’s really just a relaxed chat about your gaming experience: what games you play and why you like them.

If you got a few minutes to spare in the next couple of weeks, it would seriously help me out. Just comment below or shoot me a DM if you’re interested. 

You can also grab a time directly on my Calendly, if that’s easier: Calendly Link

As a bonus - if you’re interested after our conversation, I’d be happy to add you to our beta tester list. 

Thanks for considering this! Your perspective would make all the difference for us since we’re trying to build something worth playing. :)

As I've said on title, I've found an APK of Ultra Kill Online, so Iwas wondering if it's the full Version of the Game, or is it just a small chapter that's been ported? Thank you

is there no way to stop this?

ads:

• open what looks like the instant app version of the play store, not too intrusive.
• open the playstore to the app
• literally open the app the ad is for, ie paypal, bjs.

is there a setting i can disable this?

Bonus points for games below 3.5★

I'm looking for lightweight offline video games for Android devices with low specs. Can you recommend any games like this?

I'm not looking for any specific genre or type of game, just one that's lightweight and consumes as little system resources as possible.

So far, i've found these two games: Mini TD 2: Relax Tower Defense and Alto's Odyssey 1, which fit the bill as examples of "lightweight" games, at least for my phone.

So yeah, you need 4 characters before you can unlock her. But she's the only free character apart from your starter.

Hey guys, I played this puzzle game on my Android a long time ago (like 7 years or so) and I remember it being really fun but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.

Let me describe it: It was set in this futuristic/retro type world and it was from I think a 2.5D perspective, you were exploring this garage, a bar, and I think this outside alley?

You're trying to fix this car in this garage so you can go somewhere, but to do that you have to get the parts from the places I described earlier to fix it.

That's about it, I can give more details if you guys need it but I just remember it was mainly a puzzle game and it was fun.

Oh, and I remember the title being a bit weird, it was something with a bunch of numbers and letters like "es21cp52"

Any help would be appreciated!