In the previous article we drew a picture of how big mobile gaming is and what are the advantages and challenges in developing mobile games.
The main challenge in developing a mobile game has been the same for the past 6 years and that’s getting discovered and implicitly making a dime out of it.
This will be today’s subject: How developers for mobile games can monetize their apps and get discovered in a market of nearly 2 million mobile apps. (and growing)
If developers are wondering what specific country or niche they should target, this simple idea should be on everybody’s mind.
What’s the biggest country in the world? If you answer China or India, you’re correct, but the answer has now been ,,a little” extended. The biggest country in the world would be all the major social networks out there combined. You’d probably have a population of 2bn billion or more.
In view of this flourishing state, we’ll get into social games.
Developing any kind of game, regardless of platform, will only attract a certain number of users if the game will only be vs. AI or singleplayer mode.
Let’s face it, games are, since the beginning of time, mostly played with people and friends. That’s what social games mean. Playing with other people and making it friendly towards that goal. The key result of mobile social games is how fast they proliferate.
Alright, we’ve seen that people like to recommend social games, but how do you make a game social in the first place?
The answer is simple: social networks. Didn’t see that one coming did you? Before going into gimmicks like offering small rewards for inviting friends, think about social networks.
Take Angry Birds for example. They integrated the concept of asking users to invite 3 more friends to unlock levels. That worked for a while, it’s still a good trick, but users are catching on to this move and are becoming less invested. Especially when you block content if your users don’t invite other people. Instead of promoting social sharing, some games force it. And that’s not a good way to endear yourself to your app users. The Farmville-spammy-type approach of sending notifications to your friends and social contacts is becoming obsolete and annoying for many.
Rather than offering rewards, users are more veered to interactive content and competitiveness.
This is where we talk about the essence of social games. As Supercell Clash of Clans) founder Ilkka Paananen said, ,,What we do is we design our games so that they are better if played with other people and your friends.” In other words, a social product.
The moment for social games as a social product has never been more appropriate than now and for this there are 2 ways to go about it.
The first path you can take depends on the mechanic of the game itself. Strategy games for example that incorporate group mechanics such as player alliances or teams are conducive to become popular quickly.
The second path is when your game is based around the singleplayer concept. The buzzword here is fun which leads to a social call-to-action. For singleplayer games, integrated social networks are a crucial must.
As an example, we can take a look at _SongPop _which basically is a music trivia game. The interesting aspect of this game is that out of everybody who logs in the game, 65% log from their Facebook account. And out of those 65%, they are 35% more inclined to spend more time and money playing it than other users who don’t log in from a social network.
The moral here? People like playing with other people online, especially from their social network accounts.
In an app market filled with so many apps, if you want your mobile game to be discovered, first you have to invest in getting popular on social networks.
After you get to this point you realize that social games work wonderfully with the freemium model because people love to share things that are free. Now let’s talk monetization.
Since the early days in 2012, in-app purchases have risen to become the dominant monetization model for mobile games.
First of all, you don’t sell the game. No, I’m not pulling your leg. Most of the revenue from games doesn’t come from selling the game but from in-app purchased content. Just how much? Around to 90%-91% of mobile game revenue comes from in-app purchases.
In-app purchases can mean any type of content, from buying a sword in a game, in-game currency such as points, gems, coins, stars or whatever economy the game features, items, characters, etc.
Before putting a price tag on every little pixel in a game, it’s important to know which type of content users want to buy.
The reason why this is relevant is because you have to balance the content you’re offering very carefully. Offer too many items that don’t affect the game in any way and you’ll practically ask your users to pay for pretty pixels. Offer too little content that helps them out and your in app revenue will sink.
To highlight the importance of in-app purchases as a monetization model, we’re going to talk about a game that makes $1m or more a day. That game is Clash of Clans. The developers are Finnish. Rovio, the company who made Angry Birds is also Finnish. Coincidence? They must have
And nearly of all their revenue is coming from in-app purchases and the game is free. Now how exactly did they manage to achieve such an astounding figure?
A few key reasons. It creates engagement before it asks you to spend any money by displaying attractive animations. Then it moves on to show that you can customize your village in the game however you want. The mechanics are based on three very effective concepts. Loop optimization, appointment time and the replay feature to create engagement that lead to in-app purchases.
Loop optimization basically means learning the rules through trial and error and becoming better at figuring out the ratio between in game cost/result. Example: Buying a unit that’s more effective in a particular situation. This leads to longer sessions where players experiment with the game and in-app buying runs.
Appointment time: An old concept where let’s say some resources will be available five hours from now. That generates higher retention rates for the game because it keeps players invested in the game with something to wait for.
Replay feature: You see an attack upon your village in Clash of Clans that happened 10 hours ago. While studying the outcome you realize where you made a mistake in defending it or how you could better defend it in the future. Players thus buy more coins to get resources and optimize their village for the next round of attacks.
The downtime between action completion is a breeding ground for sustaining in-app purchases.
These extraordinarily simple mechanics lead to a cute game featuring viking-esque-fantasy barbarians reach the point where their developers make one million dollars per day or more. And it doesn’t stop here.
Because the game is so fun, that simple emotion makes you really want to invite your friends to play the game with you, which makes the game even more popular and earn more revenue.
We’ve seen the power of social networks towards games. We’ve also seen that simple gaming strategies and concepts can make it big. As the mobile gaming world becomes bigger and more profitable, we’ll start to see more refined approaches towards in-app purchases, user engagement and creating high quality games with added value to fun.
Approaches and ideas that will go beyond spamming your friends so you can get two more gems to buy a squirrel that sings balcanic neo-dub-polka, all for the sake of lowering game quality for an extra two cents.
Through simplicity, social features and balanced content with in-app purchases, mobile game developers can make make a killing in the mobile market today.
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