Cross-promotion between my own games: building a 'More games' sheet
With no ad budget, the cheapest install I can get is a player who already likes one of my games trying another. So every game now has a More games sheet: a list of my other live games, with icon, name and a one-line description in the player's language. A tap opens the game's Play listing.
Groups, not one big list
A Word Search player and a Tavern Heroes player are different people. Showing a fantasy RPG to someone relaxing with a word puzzle wastes the slot, and the reverse is true too. So games are in two groups by audience:
- Word, card and puzzle: Word Search, Bible Word Search, Word Slide, Word Push, Wordhoard, Spider Solitaire, FreeCell, Minesweeper, Moonlit Garden, Sovereign and Minesweeper Rogue.
- RPG, idle and autobattler: Genesis, Tavern Heroes, Backpack Battle, Emberfall, Idle Fishing Empire, and Minesweeper Rogue again, since it's both.
There are two exceptions. Rogue Video Poker is 18+ and gambling-themed, so it links out to the RPG group but nothing links to it. Eldritch Survivors isn't released, so it has nothing.
One module, copied everywhere
The sheet is one shared module. A script copies it, the group list and the icons into every game, and I never edit a game's copy directly. A --check mode reports any game whose copy is stale.
The list also has to stay current without app updates. A game that went live last week should appear in a sheet shipped a month ago. So the website build publishes the current live list as a small JSON file on this site, and each game fetches it and merges it over the list bundled in the app.
Tracking
Each Play link carries a referrer, like utm_source=genesis&utm_medium=crosspromo&utm_campaign=moregames, so an install from the sheet shows up in Play's acquisition reports as coming from a specific game. The games also log when the sheet opens and which game was tapped.
Bugs on the way
market://links do nothing on a device without the Play Store, like a clean emulator. Links are plainhttps://play.google.com/..., which Android hands to the Play Store when it's installed.- Game styles leaked into the sheet. Wordhoard's small-caps manuscript lettering turned up in the sheet's game names. The shared module now resets styles under its own root.
- An old live list wiped out a newer bundled one. Rogue Video Poker's sheet came up empty, because the published list predated the group change. The rule now: after changing groups, redeploy the site before testing the games.
- The Back button closed the app with the sheet open in three games that had no back-button handler at all. They have one now.
Early results
Honestly: tiny. A handful of real players have opened the sheet, and there's been exactly one cross-promotion install: a Genesis player in the UAE trying Idle Fishing Empire. That's the right kind of install, an idle player finding another idle game, but one is not a trend.
I'll look again after a couple more weeks. If taps stay near zero, the next experiment is to stop hiding it in a menu and show a single, well-chosen game card at a natural break, like the end of a run or a chapter.