How To Make Money From Mobile Games?
I have always wanted to develop my own mobile games when I was a young kid. Unfortunately, as a software developer, I’ve never had the chance to work for a mobile game development company so my dreams got postponed for a very long time. When Unity came out, developing games became really easy for game application developers who don’t know a thing about mobile game development. I’ve started to learn Unity and was fascinated by its capabilities. Unity is really awesome and very easy to learn. You also should you unity game engine to create the best mobile games.
The reality about mobile games is that they are really hard to market even if you have money. Putting your game on the Apple or Google Play Store does not bring you any traffic organically either. The mobile game market is highly saturated and you need to spend a fortune to “hopefully” make a fortune in this industry. In this article, I’ll try to explain the truth about mobile game marketing and things you should consider if you are planning to release a game.
Retention Rates and Advertisement Costs
First of all, you need to make a great mobile games before jumping onto this train. And by a great game, I mean a game that can retain at least 40% of the app installers on day 1. The statements from various mobile game development companies state that mobile game success goes by 40%-20%-10% retention rates. So day 1 is 40%, day 7 is %20, and Day 28 is 10%. What do these numbers mean? Well from a marketing perspective this means that if you spend 100.000 USD to market your game you will actually burn 60.000 USD by day 1 and by day 7 you have already burned 80.000 USD. Clearly, you need to get as many users as possible for your budget; therefore, you need to reduce the cost per app install.
Obviously, in order to make a profit, you need to generate more than 100.000 USD during the lifetime of your players. You can generate revenues from advertisement from this 28 day period but the ad revenues vary quite a lot and there is no easy prediction on how much of your 100k you can recover. The most successful games convert only 5% of their users to purchase something. The above statistics also mean that you can’t just profit by selling one item at 1.99 USD to one user. You need many in-app purchases from a single user in order to make a profit. When you are planning your game, keep these in mind.
Cost Per App Install and Organic Traffic
The bigger budget allows you to get more gamers for a cheaper cost. The big game publishers have huge ad budgets and they advertise heavily to acquire users in order to get gamers at the cheapest rate possible. They aim to reduce the cost per app install. You as an mobile game developer probably don’t have this type of an arsenal. This is so frustrating but it is the truth about the mobile gaming industry. Keep in mind that the more budget you can allocate, the more organic users you will likely to get from the app stores as a side benefit for boosting your game. Also, some publishers don’t spread their entire monthly budget evenly for 30 days, but advertise heavily for the first 3 days to get even cheaper installs and to boost organic traffic.
If you are aiming to spend no advertisement money, then you are aiming for Mission Impossible. There seem to be some individual developers (entities) whose games are played by millions. Don’t let their numbers motivate you too much. There is a very high chance that their games are supported by big publishers who don’t want to disclose their names. (I am making an edit here: Some blackhat techniques seem to work)
Organic Growth and Virality
If your mobile game does not incorporate socials such as “inviting your friend” then the organic growth mainly depends on your advertising budget. When you boost your game via advertisement, you also acquire organic users as I have stated above. Unfortunately, this is very temporary. If you pause your ad campaigns, the organic growth diminishes very fast. People talk about the importance of ASO but don’t forget that users search with short-tail keywords in the app stores. So if the short tail keyword is already dominated by a successful game, then your chances to grow organically diminishes. You may play with the keywords but unlike website traffic, Google or Apple don’t really give you many statistics about your chosen keywords.
Organic Growth and Player Reviews
The player reviews are very important and without good reviews your chances to grow organically diminishes. Your game has to ask a user for a review at the right time. Unfortunately, even the best mobile games always face some haters who drop their average ratings. This drop might be negligible if the average is above 4.0 / 5.0 but it still hurts organic growth. I have personally spent quite a lot of time to turn these negative reviews into positive reviews by replying to the users. This is a must-do and it’s really a time-consuming task. (Another edit: Reviews at Google play store are highly manipulated by blackhat world)
Analytical Tools
A game should have various analytics SDKs integrated before the release. I recommend all Facebook, Firebase, Game analytics, and Google Play Services SDKs to be integrated. And by integration, I mean sending events about your gameplay to all of these tools rather than simply putting their SDKs. The numbers do vary between these tools and you should be able to make comparisons and analyze your data carefully before making changes to your game.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, I would like to say that this is a seriously hard industry to master and you need to carefully plan your product and must have advertisement budget to be successful. People who don’t know this industry may convince you to make games. Ask them if they would invest money for marketing :-)
If you believe you can make a great game by yourself, do it, release it, test it with a small budget to check your LTV, and retention rates. (Edit: Google Admob has finally started to show LTV for your games) If the numbers seem to be promising then go to a publisher.
