Complete Guide: How To Launch Your First Mobile Game?
Do you know what separates mobile games with 100s of thousands of users and games which are played only by friends and family?
Mobile game launch strategy.
How to soft launch your first mobile game development services? How to do a hard launch? What are the key steps to success? How to get people to actually play your game?
I’ve written a simple 5-step process to help you launch your first mobile game. Let’s dive in.
- Set A Launch Date
Before you do anything, you should decide on a launch date. Mark it in your calendar.
Exciting, right?
Just like with anything else you plan; you need to have a clear deadline. Something to keep you on track. It will help you organize all your pre-launch activities and you’ll have a specific goal to strive for.
However, make sure that the date you have set is realistic. Otherwise, you’ll end up postponing the launch several times. That can negatively affect your marketing strategy.
2. Do Some Research First
Research time!
There are a couple of things you should examine in order to create a killer mobile game launch strategy. Here are the most important ones:
Research Your Target Audience
The first thing is doing thorough target audience research. The success of any mobile game launch depends on it. You need to know who you want to target, where, and why. This is not something you should guess.
Granted, it might be challenging to define your target audience when you’re launching your first game ever. There’s no existing data to go by. However, identifying what makes your game special and what kind of people might want to play it is a great start.
3. Analyze Your Competitors
You don’t have to go a long way to grab your first win. Why try to reinvent the wheel?
Everything you need is already out there. Rather take a look at what your competition is doing. This is not something that will help you go big, but it’s a good way to get started.
When it comes to competitor intelligence — the market is crowded. There’s a solution and a source for any type of data or information you need.
4. Start Building a Strong Online Presence
Building an online presence early, long before you launch the game, has many benefits.
Here’s why.
It allows you to create a hype around your mobile game and start building a community that supports it. That way, when you finally launch, you’ll already have users that will download and play your game.
5. Create a Website for Your Mobile Game
The first step to building a presence online is creating a website for your mobile game. Even though you still haven’t launched the game, it’s important to have a way to showcase it and announce the launch.
6. Start Posting on Social Media
The key thing for a successful launch strategy is to create a hype around your game and get noticed in this crowded market. Social media is the best way to do that — it’s where the people are. Regarding TikTok, this is a social media network that’s rapidly growing in popularity. It’s particularly great for promoting mobile games. That’s due to the fact that it’s populated by a young Gen Z audience. Plus, it’s a video platform that lends itself well to showcasing mobile games.
7. Be Active in Gaming Communities
Along with social media, you should also be active in different gaming communities. Not just to blatantly promote your game, but to create real relationships with like-minded people.
Reddit is a platform that attracts a lot of gamers and developers, which makes it the perfect place to connect with the community.
However, Reddit has strict rules for promoting your stuff. There’s a 1:10 ratio when it comes to self-promotion so make sure you follow that. Otherwise, you’ll get banned or other users will destroy you and you won’t be able to show your face on Reddit ever again.
8. Hard Launch: Time to Release
So you’ve fixed all the issues you identified during the soft launch. You now have a finished product that’s ready for a hard launch. Everything is polished and ready to go.
This is the moment you have been waiting for.
It’s time to release your game globally (or to your target market).
Here’s what you need to do during the hard launch. Also, you can hire mobile game developers to get things easier.
9. Contact the Press and Bloggers
When you have your press kit ready, you can start contacting the press, bloggers, influencers, etc. The goal is to get your mobile game featured or reviewed.
Granted, that’s not easy if this is your first mobile game. It’s hard to get the attention of bloggers, especially when you’re asking for a free review.
