In February, Gismart released two of its games at once. One of them — the Pencil Rush 3D hyper—casual arcade – turned out to be a hit. Its monthly downloads amounted to more than 8.3 million. With App2Top.ru the British-Belarusian developer shared what metrics the game had at the start.
Pencil Rush 3D is a game in which players overcome obstacles with colored pencils, coloring pictures along the way. The peculiarity of the project is the combination of genres — ASMR and runner, which traditionally shows high retention metrics. After passing the obstacles, the player is offered a “coloring book”.
According to the company, the first tests showed CPI at the level of $0.20 -$ 0.26. At the same time, the CTR was 7% with a fairly high CPM (cost of 1000 impressions). Therefore, the team needed to continue working on improving metrics, experimenting with creatives, color and behavioral schemes.
The company does not share which business metrics the project eventually came to, but says that it managed to seriously raise retention. Initially, he did not suit the team at all.
“At the start, the retention of the first day was only 24%. Some of the players quickly passed the levels, noticed the repetition of pictures for coloring, and justifiably left the game. Just a few days later, we released an update with a lot of diverse content, which immediately raised the retention rate by 10%. We realized that the game has potential, and continued to work with content, monetization and mechanics, eventually increasing the retention of the first day to 45%, ” Gismart comments.
By the end of March, the game can collect at least as much more, judging by the dynamics of downloads. According to AppMagic, by the 18th, the project has generated 6.8 million installations. If the game continues to gain an audience, it may well enter the top 10 most downloaded games for the month. To do this, it needs to reach the mark of 14-15 million installations.
In addition to Pencil Rush 3D, Gismart also released Warp Slider, another hyper-casual game, last month. Its monthly installations amounted to about 2 million downloads.
Warp Slider was born out of a trend in TikTok — a filter that “distorts” time and allows you to make unrealistic shots. As told App2Top.ru , tests at the prototype stage confirmed the potential of the game. At the same time, a small number of levels in the prototype did not allow the retention to be measured correctly, so the Churn Rate became the main metric by which the decision was made on the further development of the product. Users passed a large number of levels before “falling off”. In addition, from the very first tests, the CTR on top creatives reached up to 10%.