On February 26, Rusbase released a voluminous interview with Alexey Grigorkin, one of the authors of the Sandbox Coloring game, whose total downloads reached 30 million, and estimated monthly income is $ 2 million. App2Top.ru publishes a short retelling of the material.
What is Sandbox Coloring?
Sandbox Coloring is a pixel coloring game. Its users color black and white images by dots.
Sandbox Coloring
Today, such applications are very popular on the mobile market.
The Sandbox Coloring trend that started has 30 million downloads. Its main competitor Pixel Art only on Google Play has more than 10 million.
The main unique feature of the Sandbox Coloring project is the way of monetization. There are no ads in it, which the team does not add in principle, nor traditional payments for content. The main thing that the user pays for is a subscription. It gives temporary access to part of the content (all coloring pages are divided into two types – with and without a heart, the one with a heart is available only to subscribers).
What metrics did Grigorkin disclose to Rusbase?
Alexey Grigorkin denies that his team earns $2 million a month on the project. That’s how much according to Sensor Tower is the revenue of the game in thirty days. According to Alexey, analysts are seriously mistaken*.
* According to another service, DataMagic, the same $2 million was his company’s income from the project in January 2018, already taking into account the deduction of the share of stores and taxes.
Dynamics of sales of Sandbox Coloring (November-January, the world, iOS and Android)
However, Alexey noted that the game could earn $ 15-20 thousand a day if it implemented advertising.
According to him, that’s how much successful Sandbox Coloring clones earn.
The DAU of the game is now 5 million.
A monthly subscription to Sandbox costs $8. At the same time, the percentage of those paying is “less than 1%”. But the share of those who extend it after the first time is very high – 60%.
Daily jumps on the Android platform – 150 thousand per day. On iOS — about 40 thousand per day.
The project has a very high retention rate. Retention on the second day is 80%, and on the thirtieth – 35-40%.
About 20% of the Sandbox Coloring audience are teenagers and older people. 70% are elementary school students. Adult audience – 10%.
The majority of the project’s users in the USA are 40%. The same number is in the UK.
What else did Grigorkin tell you?
So far, Sandbox Coloring is Alexey’s most successful project, which has been developing since 2011.
The project was released in June 2017 on iOS, and later on Android. The main part of the clones was pulled up by November-December.
The game grew out of a “collective drawing game”, in which the developers were disappointed.
The work on Sandbox Coloring “from the moment of the idea to the final concept” took four weeks for the initial team – two programmers and a designer. Now the team is bigger – ten guys plus two co-founders, one of whom is Alexey.
According to Grigorkin, there was no explosive success. They went to the store, bought $ 100 worth of Facebook ads every day, and after a while organic went, which brought the game to the Top 10 downloads in the USA.
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