A new program of Google helped a local indie company improve their first mobile title.
Ranida Games, a Philippine-based game development startup, experienced a 4% increase in the conversion rate for its latest mobile game “Vita Fighters” after taking Google Play’s ten-week Indie Games Accelerator (IGA) program.
A higher conversion rate means more users install Vita Fighters on their devices upon clicking on the game’s advertisements online. The game has reached half a million downloads on Google Play as of July 21, 2023.
Once the game scales in popularity locally, the startup said their next step is to tap the global market.
“We really want to grow our business, not only in terms of downloads, but in terms of revenue,” Ranida co-founder and managing officer Walter Manalo said.
Vita Fighters is a 3D-block styled, 1v1 fighting game that makes a tribute to the classics in the genre such as Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter. It currently has 35 playable characters and 16 background stages.
Through the IGA mentorship and education program, small game developers like Ranida have the opportunity to learn how to grow its own games with data analytics from experienced game developers.
“With IGA, especially with the mentors that we had, they equipped us with tools, the mentors explained a lot of things to us,” Ranida CEO and studio head Ben Joseph Banta said.
Ranida is one of the startups in Google Play’s 2022 IGA class, and the only Filipino one at that. During this time, the startup’s Vita Fighters was its second mobile game and still in the works.
They released the game on Google Play in May 2023.
The 12-person team of game developers also found a “sense of community” in the IGA program as they encountered other startups that faced similar challenges in building their own video games.
“Having the chance to meet our fellow developers here in IGA, we felt like we were a family,” Manalo added.
Vita Fighters has been rated 4.3 out of 5 stars on Google Play and 4.4 out of 5 stars on the App Store. The game has yet to be released on Steam.
