Transcription
Recently, I made this mobile game. Today, we'll take a look at the revenue, some statistics, and how with a simple game we made history.
You know those fake ads, right? When you click on it, the game looks totally different. It's been a famous game for years that made billions of dollars. While working as a cashier to repay my debts, I decided to fix it by making the real game, and I created this YouTube channel to promote it. The plan was simple: make what people asked for, get more visibility than the scams in the top charts, and as a result, beat the fake games.
Listen, this video will be crazy. So, you have to stay tuned in. And before we start, this is the percentage of my viewers that are subscribed to the channel. Guys, this video is not sponsored and not monetized. So, if you want more real games, just subscribe.
In the first three videos about Real War, I told you I had big plans for it, and I promised that I would share the revenue and my promotion strategies with complete transparency. Let's go back to the beginning. First, I made a prototype in 4 days, then I sent it to Apple and Google, and it got rejected because fake games were already showing fake screenshots that looked exactly like the ads. So, according to Apple my game looked fake. I paid $99 per year for Apple and $20 for Google Play. Then, I spent months negotiating with both platforms, and eventually, the game got approved. Perfect.
Now, it was finally time to promote it. But first, I added ads to the game. I wanted to make sure that if the game blew up, it could help me repay my 4 years debts. Then, I made an 8-minute YouTube video in French about the game. 30,000 views. To me, that was huge. It brought some downloads and generated $148 over 28 days. Then, I made several TikTok videos in French using CapCut and my iPhone 12. Together, they got 300,000 views and generated [music] $1,008 over 12 days. That That was just amazing.
Then, inspired by a YouTuber who reposted one of his French videos in English, I decided to translate my entire video in English. I had to train my English by reading my script again and again and again until I could finally understand to speaking, even though some people still don't understand me. Then I created my English channel and uploaded my first video, and you guys completely changed my life. The video exploded, over 400,000 views, and it generated $22,000 over 64 days. At that point, I was in shock. And honestly, if the story ended there, $20,000 was already life-changing money for me. I could repay my debts, quit my boring job, and focus on my passion, making games.
Then I tried short-form content in English. Instagram worked surprisingly well. I got about 500,000 views there alone. The other platform didn't work at all, but it still generated about $500 over 7 days. I thought the story was over. The game was slowly dying, and I had already started working on the next really good game, which is a battle way.
But then, another developer friend came to me with an offer, and that offer completely changed the future of Real War. The goal was simple, measure whether the game could be profitable through paid acquisition. And if it worked, he was willing to spend over $10,000 per day to promote it. In exchange, he would take a share of the profit of the game. I still own the game and make the decisions.
So first, I had to record and edit ads, a lot of ads. Then he spent about $800 over 10 days. It got us about 3,000 players, and the game generated $500. So yeah, we lost $200, but we got enough players to analyze the game's market potential. And the results were very promising. At that point, acquiring one player cost around 30 cents, and each [music] player generated about 50 cents. So every player generated about 20 cents of [music] profit. In theory, let's say we spend $300,000, it should generate $500,000, which means $200,000 of profit, right? But it's not that easy. The more money you spend, the more expensive players become. So if you spend too much, you can easily put yourself into [music] debts.
But I'm lucky, my friend is very good at what he does. He managed to make profit every day with my ads. He spent [music] $28,000 over 50 days and we were making about $1,000 per day. Before increasing the budget to increase profit, [music] we decided to wait. We wanted to really stay small and focus on improving retention and playtime first. For this, my friend hired an entire team of developers and artists. Today, we are about six people working on the game.
They created a much harder version of the game than mine with incremental upgrades similar to the game Epic Mine Evolution. You know, I thought my version will win because it had skins, quests, endless [music] mode, a leaderboard, and 30 different levels. While their version had only two levels and upgrades, [music] that's it. So, we AB tested both versions to see which one was best and there was no doubt. I got [music] destroyed. People played their version twice as much as mine. They played longer, they came back more often, and they generated at least twice as much money per player with only two levels. Normally, the game would have slowly died, but this new version gave it a new start. After adding more levels and improving the juiciness, we released [music] it to all new players.
The promotion budget kept increasing. One of the team developers from Lawson's team even created a playable ad. We kept adding [music] levels, bosses, environments, gems, levels like morphic ads, soldiers merging into stronger soldiers. We created tons of new features that are continuously being AB tested. So, many players have different features even though they have the same version. It's honestly surreal to watch my little project become something this big. Guys, I'm just a software developer who has been making games since the age of 14 and right now, it feels like a dream.
We also introduced in-app purchases after many players requested them, but the goal isn't to drain the players' bank accounts. It's still meant to be a casual game. So, now let's look at the actual numbers. As you can see, the numbers [music] kept increasing and every day I became more and more shocked looking at the dashboard. Back in December, my friend told me that the game will make $100,000 per month easy. I didn't believe him, but then one day I opened the dashboard [music] and I saw this, $27,000 in one day, per day. What? Even after deducting spending, it's still $10,000 of daily profit. That's about 10 times my monthly salary from my previous job earned in a single day. It doesn't feel real and eventually the game crossed to $1 million in total revenue over the period from 17 January to 22 May, $1 million.
Wait, for clarification receive $1 million. First, [music] we deduct the advertising cost, which are huge. We are currently spending $500,000 per month. Then my friend takes his share and then all friends' taxes combined take up to 70% before I get the money. Most of it goes into my company so I can build even better games [music] in the future, but yes, this is life-changing. I'm not planning to do anything crazy with the money. I know what it's like to struggle financially. The craziest thing I'll do [music] is take my family on a trip to Japan next year.
Oh, and even crazier, a big game publishing company reached out to buy Real War. They made an offer to buy it for about $8 million. This is insane, but we decided to decline the offer. This way we keep control over the game while betting on its long-term success. Yeah, at this point I'd understand if you don't believe me. Also, before you ask what makes the most money between inner purchases and ads, here is one of our monthly reports. As you can see 67% of the revenue come from ads and 32% come from inner purchases. And the most purchased product is the one to remove ads. While making this video, the game's revenue has even crossed $2 million. Thank you so much, everyone.
Also, you probably have seen my ads because we spent already over $1 million in advertising and my ads already have got more than 100 million views. That's crazy. The video is not over, you have to watch till the end, really. Also, I tried to be as transparent as possible through this entire journey. I hope you appreciate it. I was a bit hesitant to share the result at this point, to be honest, because that's a lot. But, I wanted to share it with the community who supported me from the start. At the beginning, I never thought it would go this far. Now, I guess it's time to turn the other fake guys into new real games. And that's exactly what I did in my last video. Oh, and just one more thing, we beat the fake games. [music] >> [music] [music]