u/Amazing-Orange-1021

My tiny arcade game is finally starting to get real players, but AdMob is humbling me badly 😅

I’m seeing decent engagement from some countries and even managed to keep a few players around for months, but the eCPM swings are brutal right now.

Sometimes I’ll see decent spikes, then suddenly it drops again and makes me question everything about my monetization setup.

Still trying to figure out the balance between:

- keeping the gameplay clean

- not annoying players with ads

- and actually making enough revenue to keep developing the game long term

Indie mobile devs who survived this phase, how long did it take before your ad revenue started stabilizing?

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I’ve been experimenting with that idea in a small arcade survival project I’m building in Ghana called Thorn Dash (previously MeeWay).

Instead of directly controlling the bird, the player clears and manipulates the path ahead while trying to keep the bird alive through increasingly dangerous thorn patterns.

At first I thought people would get frustrated by the lack of direct control, but weirdly the opposite started happening. Some players became extremely focused on protecting the bird and chasing survival runs.

Now I’m trying to understand why that tension works psychologically and how far the idea can go without becoming unfair or exhausting.

Still a tiny project, but it has been one of the most interesting design experiments I’ve worked on so far.