2024-07-30 - GUNCHO

First Month of GUNCHO

On June 25, 2024, we released our latest game, GUNCHO. Together with Terri Vellmann and Sam Webster, a completely new and awesome team I had never worked with before, we finished the game in about 11 months. The quick turnaround of the game was due to a solid prototype Terri and I created for the 2022 7DRL Challenge, where we initially developed the game as a 2D concept and then expanded it into 3D, evolving a good idea into the full version of GUNCHO.

The game was released simultaneously on iOS and Android as a free-to-try version with ads support and a premium $4.99 unlock. It was also released on Steam as a premium $4.99 game. A week after the release, we added Sam’s GUNCHO OST for $2.99 to Steam, which can be purchased as a standalone or bundled with the game for a 10% discount at $7.50.

Pre-Release

Since this was our first game released simultaneously on both mobile and desktop, marketing was more challenging as we aimed to appeal to both player types. Early on, we decided that GUNCHO would be a small game that would eventually receive more content if the initial reception was good. Especially on Steam, this is a difficult path since people expect longer play sessions when sitting down in front of a PC compared to playing a mobile game on the go. Thanks to the help of Chris Zukowski’s “How To Market A Game” and its super helpful Discord community, we optimized our store page significantly. By clearly communicating the scope of our game, we haven’t encountered too much negative feedback yet, indicating that being open about our intentions was a good move.

We also participated in the Steam Next Fest in June, right before our release, to gain additional wishlists. Unfortunately, this wasn’t very successful since the Next Fest is quite large these days, and already popular games receive most of the traffic, making it hard for lesser-known games to reach new players. What definitely helped were a bunch of early videos of our demo from content creators on YouTube, most notably Retromation, which helped us gain some traction. On Steam, GUNCHO gathered 5,000 wishlists pre-release, which was about 2,000-3,000 short of getting into the upcoming games featuring spot.

It’s well known that App Store features, while still very effective, are not as powerful as they used to be. Nonetheless, they remain an important marketing beat when a game releases. Before the release, I was already in contact with an App Store Editor who reached out to us for a potential feature. We started the pre-order phase for GUNCHO on the App Store one month prior to the release, and with some help (the pre-order got a smaller feature as well), we reached around 12,000 pre-orders.

Featuring

During the launch week, we received a nice top 3 Best New Games feature spot on the App Store and a Game of the Day banner. In addition to that, the 12,000 pre-orders helped us with the initial marketing push.

GUNCHO reached the top 50 strategy games (ranked 48) and the top 200 puzzle games (ranked 178) on the App Store. On Google Play, we did not receive any features and had to rely on pure word-of-mouth marketing from our community of Android players.

Reception

As mentioned, GUNCHO was always planned as a small game experience, and we tried to make this clear from the start. To my surprise, GUNCHO has received very good ratings across all platforms and might be one of my best-rated games so far. On iOS, the game has 4.7 stars from 1,500 ratings; on Google Play, 4.5 stars from 250 ratings; and on Steam, it has 91% positive reviews from 35 reviews.

We received features from several press outlets, most notably Game of the Week from TouchArcade and a great article from Kotaku.

Sales

GUNCHO’s revenue is split between a few platforms and sources: in-app sales and ad revenue from iOS and Android, and direct purchases on Steam from the Windows and Mac platforms.

Overall, GUNCHO made $15,700 in the first month from all sources after the platform share.

While iOS was the best-selling platform with $9,400 from in-app purchases, ads from both iOS and Android were a surprising second place with $2,600, followed by Steam with $2,500 and Android with $1,200.

In terms of downloads, iOS vastly surpassed Android with 106,000 vs. 7,000 downloads in the first month.

Conclusion

GUNCHO was an awesome project, especially since we had a very clear design from the start. Due to the clear goals, we managed our time effectively, and since the game was my first endeavor into 3D, I personally learned quite a lot along the way. Both Terri and Sam were excellent collaborators whom I would love to work with again in the future. As stated before, we would love to expand GUNCHO, and we will probably decide on how to handle that in a few months. A quick shoutout to Esty8Nine, who provided valuable feedback and consulting that significantly improved the game during development. And, of course, a big thanks to my Discord/testing community that helped us squash hundreds of bugs, making the release version very stable and polished.

Again, thanks to everyone who played GUNCHO and helped us with the development!

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