This is a partial repost of this post over at r/gaming, however WebGames seemed to like the game a lot the first time around as well :)

TL;DR of below About two months ago I shared this post to r/Gaming about Hex FRVR and the game instantly took off, peaking at more than 5500 concurrent online. Reddit made my game huge and turned me into a successful indie developer.

Play the game, or read on for a story on the power of Reddit!

Before I shared Hex FRVR I was quite proud of my previous daily record of 31k visitors. On the day I shared the game, I reached 182k unique visitors and as people kept sharing the game, I eventually peaked at 410k daily visitors a few days later! These days the daily amount of players have stabilised at around 170k. Here is a graph

While that is amazing by itself, it's pretty clear that the gaming press reads Reddit (Hi!) as the game was quickly picked up by CNET, PC Gamer, Venture Beat, and many more (Anyone wants a full list?)

Most importantly, the shear volume of traffic made the game an economic success as well. Even though I only have advertisement in the iOS and Android versions, have disabled video ads (I hate those!), and only show ads about 30% of the time, when you start a new game. Hex FRVR still makes an amazing ~$600/day from in-game advertising. Not to bad for a simple puzzle game! Spoiler

As the game was pretty new when I originally posted. It did have some major bugs bugs and left a lot of features to be desired. However /r/Gaming was amazing at giving feedback and quite a lot of the suggestions and ideas from the original thread, has now been incorporated into the game. Here is a list of the major improvements:

• You now actually get a score bonus for doing combos!
• The game now saves the game state, if you reload or restart the app.
• At scores about 100k the game now becomes challenging for people who are really good at the game (Yes this was a major issue for r/Gaming redditors)
• You can now disable ads in the mobile version with a micro payment (This makes about $500/Month, thanks for the support!)
• The game no longer pauses your own music while playing on iOS!
• I rewrote the mobile versions from scratch, making the games feel like native apps on both Android and iOS.
• Many, many bug fixes.

However, the success have had one downside. Today there is about 150 clones of the game on the market across app stores. And while I am actually 100% ok with people re-implementing the game, learning along the way and even making a more popular game than mine, about 40% of the games have straight up stolen music, graphics or even the entire game. Fighting that has been tiring and there don't seem to be an effective process for doing so on all platforms.