“Why I decided to go to a publisher after 10 months of single-handedly developing a game”

Iurii Chechulin, the developer of AXES.iо and Magica.iо, wrote an article about the ups and downs of indie development, project metrics, and his personal experience of working with a publisher.

Three years ago, I single-handedly developed an .io mobile game where you could endlessly run around the map and kill enemies with throwing weapons. I uploaded it to the store and it was relatively successful, even without any marketing support: it brought in about $3000 a month on organic traffic alone.

It went on like this for almost a year until I decided to contact the publisher for the first time. This decision changed a lot: in a couple of months, AXES.io made almost half a million dollars. Without any doubts, a feature did wonders for the project, but we got it only after deploying several major updates with the studio’s game designer.

Now, as I’m working on my third game with the publisher, I decided to share that first experience of linking up with a publisher and tell you what has changed in the game, what features we’ve added and how it affected the metrics.