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A 2020 pixel-shooter mobile game that earned $119K over five years by porting to every platform
1M+ Android downloads
An old game with just 15% retention and sloppy design turned scraps of revenue into rent-paying cash flow by "porting to everything" — indie games don't win on a breakout hit, they win on blanketing every channel.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Enderance isn't a success-story showpiece — it's a real case of "how a flawed product got operated into cash flow." The developer, Creauctopus, working solo (art and music outsourced), built this pixel-art sci-fi shooter for mobile in June 2020, first launching on both iOS and Android. Its most crucial stroke of luck was landing editorial features on the App Store and Google Play, and it rode that lever to over a million organic downloads. But the game design was rough and day-one retention was only 15% — by conventional standards this is a failed game, and someone else might have given up. Creauctopus didn't. He did something counterintuitive: instead of optimizing a game that couldn't retain people, he moved it, untouched, onto every platform he could publish on, actively taking publisher invitations to port it to Xbox, Switch, Steam, and HTML5. Each platform alone didn't earn much, but over five years it added up: Android $85,447, iOS $16,757, Xbox about $13,000, Switch about $3,000, Steam $625, HTML5 $150 — a lifetime total of $119,179. To this day the old game still brings in a few hundred dollars a month.
The first million downloads came from one place: editorial features on the App Store and Google Play at the June 2020 launch. Nothing else in this business ever generated traffic at that scale.
The quick-reference card — acquisition channels, replication playbook, and risk map — is members-only.
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Data credibility: The creator's own account: Android $85,447 (ads $26,626 + free version $12,000 + paid version $45,000 + nearly $2,000 from early AdMob), iOS $16,757, Xbox about $13,000, Switch about $3,000, Steam $625, HTML5 $150 — a lifetime total of $119,179; he showed the backend but didn't put up item-by-item screenshots in the video, so it's treated as self-reported. All revenue figures are founder-reported or estimated by the video creator — unaudited.
The first dollar in a game like this arrives as a rounding error: one interstitial served through AdMob, worth a fraction of a cent, multiplied by a feature-driven download wave until it turns into real money.
Nothing here compounds through players. At 15 percent day-one retention there is no referral loop and no community, and the install curve after the feature window went one way.
The quiet stretch in this business is not before launch, it is after the feature window closes. A featured game gets a few weeks of install volume and then the curve drops, and at 15 percent day-one retention there is no residual audience holding it up.
The rest of this breakdown — 10 more sections — is in the Unicorn Club, with every section of all 1,335 ideas: first customers, first dollar, the flywheel, and the silent stretch.
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