I spent about $1,000 advertising my first mobile game. In return, I made one in-app sale worth $2.50 from a player in Australia.
I was thrilled.
That purchase was not proof that I had built a successful business. It was proof that a stranger had found something I made, downloaded it, played it, and decided it was worth paying for. At that point in my life, that felt enormous.
The game was called Meme Runner, and building it became my introduction to mobile games, app stores, paid acquisition, user-generated content, retention, and the difficult art of deciding when a project has taught you enough.
Why I moved to mobile
After walking away from two oversized PC game projects, I wanted a faster way to learn. PC development had introduced me to long production cycles, large creative ambitions, and the challenge of finding enough money and people to finish anything.
Mobile games seemed to offer a tighter loop. I could make something smaller, release it, study how people responded, and update it quickly. I had always loved the business side of building, so the combination of creativity and measurable feedback appealed to me.
Like many 17-year-old boys, I also loved memes.
An endless runner built around meme characters felt like the perfect first experiment. The concept was simple enough to explain in one sentence, familiar enough for people to understand immediately, and ridiculous enough that I would enjoy making it.
Building with the tool I already knew
I built Meme Runner in Unreal Engine. It was the only engine I knew from my earlier PC projects, and at the time, learning Unity felt like starting over.
That decision made development familiar, but it would make distribution much harder later.
While working on the game, I was also taking a 3D animation program. I used what I was learning to create the game's environments and characters. Early on, my process was rough. I found free meme-inspired 3D models and attached them to humanoid bodies. As my modeling improved, I began replacing those borrowed pieces with original characters and a more deliberate cartoon style.
The visual progress became one of the most satisfying parts of the project. Each version looked more like an actual game and less like a collection of experiments held together by enthusiasm.
The real boss battle was packaging
Finishing the game was only the beginning. Publishing it was a separate technical project.
My first Android builds opened to a black screen. I spent weeks testing fixes and hundreds of dollars on marketplace plugins before I finally produced a version that worked and reached Google Play.
Then I turned to iOS.
Unreal would not package the game for Apple without a Mac. I tried emulators and every workaround I could find online, but nothing worked. Eventually, I bought an old Mac specifically to build the iOS version.
After several restless nights, I got it through.
Android releases became manageable once I understood the process. iOS updates still consumed entire days, which meant the Apple version was almost always several releases behind the Google Play version. I had wanted quick iteration, but my choice of engine had quietly added friction to every loop.
Buying my first real data
Once the game was live, I wanted to understand mobile marketing instead of just reading about it. I started with Google and Meta ads and eventually spent around $1,000 of my own money.
The campaign produced that single $2.50 purchase from Australia.
Financially, this was an awful return. Emotionally, it was electric. Someone I did not know had paid for something inside my game. That tiny transaction made the whole system feel real and pushed me to keep experimenting.
My next strategy was user-generated content. This was 2022, when videos reading stories from Ask Reddit over Subway Surfers footage were everywhere. Meme Runner was also an endless runner, so I contacted hundreds of those accounts and offered them gameplay footage and a small payment to use my game instead.
A few accepted. Altogether, the videos reached roughly two million views and brought in a few hundred installs.
The result was not a breakout, but it was useful. I was beginning to see the difference between attention, installs, retention, and revenue. A large view count could look impressive while producing very little lasting behavior.
Rebuilding the wrong thing beautifully
I became convinced that the high cost per install and steep player drop-off came from the game's quality. So I spent several months rebuilding the characters from scratch.
By then, I had about a year and a half of 3D animation practice behind me. The new characters were expressive, stylized, and built around their individual memes. Looking back, I still think they were good.
I promoted the update with a series of strange animated videos. One featured the Moai meme character dancing while a bizarre story played in the background. I posted five clips across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, hoping one might take off.
None passed 1,000 views.
The people who did see them laughed, commented, and engaged. That was encouraging, but it did not solve the underlying problem. I had improved the characters, polished the menu, and made better promotional material. The central gameplay was still not strong enough to keep people playing.
Knowing when the lesson is complete
Eventually, I stopped working on Meme Runner.
Endless runners were already fading, and mine was not good enough to overcome that. The menu had become genuinely fun and full of personality, but the game itself had not caught up with it.
Killing the project did not make the time a waste. Meme Runner taught me how to finish and publish a game, fight through two app-store pipelines, create 3D assets, run ads, negotiate UGC placements, read acquisition results, and separate vanity metrics from useful ones.
Most importantly, it taught me that polish cannot rescue a weak core loop. Better characters can improve a game. A beautiful menu can make it feel more complete. Two million views can put it in front of people. None of those things can manufacture retention if the moment-to-moment experience is not compelling.
That $2.50 purchase was never a business success. It was something smaller and more useful: evidence that the loop from idea to player was real.
Meme Runner did not become the game I hoped it would be, but it became the first mobile game I shipped. That made it the project that turned mobile development from an idea into a practice.