Almost two weeks have passed since we woke up in the morning and found out that Dealer’s Life was chosen by Google Play to be featured in the Indie Corner in the “New Indie Highlights” collection.
It turned out by accident while I was browsing data about store positioning, I saw a big (which would become ever bigger) increase in daily downloads of Dealer’s Life Premium version and I immediately wondered why. So I went to check if we were featured on the Simulation category page in some new country but I saw a whole new set of “Featured Home” countries, which brings a huge difference in terms of visibility and audience.
This news struck me like a lightning, sure we had submitted our game a couple of months before but we had no news from Google and we simply thought that our request was tagged with a “yeah, sure” tag (probably in their immense data centers they have entire clusters of servers named “yeah_sure”), archived and left for good.
I shared the news with Fiz and we were so surprised that for a good half an hour we did nothing but celebrating with a huge feeling of accomplishment, sharing it on our social pages.
It’s true, it’s really a great accomplishment that comes after more than one year working on DL, our very first game and our first attempt in making people have fun with our ideas and our visions. It’s an accomplishment that encourages us to go ahead and joins the dozens of positive reviews that we have received. It’s new energy, it’s a morale boost, it’s an acknowledgment that someone in a huge corporation saw our game and said “Hey, that’s actually good!”.
Of course this is no golden pot but it’s helping our sales (which of course keep us *alive* and working on this wonderful path) and most of all our game visibility, because there is no worst thing for a game developer than an ignored game, drowned in a sea of “mainstream” games.
Speaking of choices, we are proud of having got so far by choosing a game design completely free of IAP even if the latter is the current standard for the mobile market and even if this can have hurt a bit our sales. I will surely dig deeper into this topic with an article because it’s something that needs to be addressed carefully but right now I can tell you that this is something that increases our sense of accomplishment, especially when we read reviews from people that celebrate this choice as one of their preferred aspects.
So, probably you are wondering “what now?”.
Well, now there are still a lot of things to do and we are still committed with all our hearts and our heads on improving even more Dealer’s Life.
Two days ago we released in Beta the new 0.76 version which includes, among other changes, Google Play Games integration and Achievements which will increase fun and surely will satisfy all the achievement hunters among our players. In the meanwhile we also reached the huge milestone of 100,000 downloads on Dealer’s Life Lite.
Then there will be the big change we talked about for the last three months: recurrent characters and encounters! The first set of encounters and dialogues (policeman, special agent, mafia guy, mafia boss, construction worker) is ready and we are testing them in those very days, hopefully we will be able to release them in Beta with the following release, meaning that from that moment our players will have to take their choices and accept their consequences…
And then there will be Google Play Games cloud save (so that players can continue on the Premium version the game they started on the Lite version), a new item pack (*SPOILER ALERT*: it will be geek themed!), German and Spanish localization and a lot of features requested on the Public Roadmap by our players.
Our players… the same people I would like to thank so much for having stayed with us on this journey, helping us with feedback, proposing new ideas or even simply telling us that they like our game.
Thank you very much to all Dealer’s Life players… and keep up the good deals!
