To young (and not-so-young) developers who are passionate about building a specific game.
Here's a question that game developers often ask: I'm going to build a game and I have an idea, how do I evaluate its feasibility? After months and a lot of other resources, you definitely want to make a game that not only plays with friends, but also actually makes you money.
Take a quick look at a set of stats: An average of 10,000 new games appear in the mobile store* every month. Even in the most obscure category, these games will experience rankings in a country at least once a day. That said, all of these apps get at least a little attention when they first hit the shelves — get a few thousand downloads and make hundreds of dollars. About two-thirds of them seem to have been the result of a lot of painstaking effort by the developers: they have complete gameplay, art styles, user interfaces, and so on. We can infer that these developers put in a lot of effort, have the right skills, and are passionate about a particular idea.
However, only 3% of these games earn more than $100,000 (about $637,000) over their lifetime. What about the rest? Other developers certainly have some ambition and belief that their ideas have the same potential as those that of successful stories. Alas, it's just a pity that things didn't go as planned.
So, what can you do? How do you improve your chances of commercial success for your future games? In fact, you can figure out if your idea has commercial potential by looking at a few areas.
Has anyone else had a similar idea? Look for similar products.
Sometimes it's not uncommon for us to want to develop a version of our own after playing a certain game. For example, develop a work similar to Archero or Brawl Stars. Have you ever had a similar thought? Before diving into the development work, check to see if anyone else has already had a similar idea. If so, what was the outcome of their efforts?
Here are a few ways to find apps with similar styles:
- Search for keywords in the mobile store. On Google Play, this approach works. Take the previously mentioned Archero, for example, and the search results for it are ideal. However, this approach doesn't work for all games: its efficiency depends on how a particular store ranks its search results and how well the search terms compete.
- Search by subtype. This option is available for the following apps: AppAnnie (though it's a paid app and expensive), GameIntel (free, you can see the top 5 apps in the U.S. free app rankings by subtype), and AppMagic (free, unlimited).
After surveying and listing a whole bunch of games that most closely align with your target subtype, you'll be able to assess how special your idea is; what kind of game design, monetization, art style, and user interface you look like to succeed; and whether you'll be able to create a work with a certain conviction that will rank among the most successful games known.
It's important to note that searching only for reference apps at the top of the leaderboard can lead to survivor bias. So it's also important to keep an eye out for apps that aren't as successful. Dig deeper into the store and you'll find thousands of innovative ideas that haven't been able to make a splash lie there peacefully (and possibly not serenely).
While this type of analysis won't help you find 100 percent successful game ideas, it can prevent you from making costly mistakes by making the most of other developers' expertise.
Develop a variant of a successful game
This approach to development sometimes works very well, but it's still important to analyze the mistakes made by others before embarking on your own development journey.
Let's take Archero as an example for a moment, if you want to create a variant of your own.
Take a look at archero's monthly revenue comparison with 18 of its most prominent clones. Yes, the blue areas in the overlay chart represent Archero's own revenue, while the thin lines in multiple other colors represent the combined revenue of all of its cloned competitors. Pretty incredible, right? All the developers of these games probably have a beautiful vision: they try their best to inject something unique and exciting into the game in the hope of success; they put a lot of effort into it. However, without exception, he could not even touch the heels.
It's also worth noting that the revenue of the original Archero has been declining almost from the start. What does this tell us? Most importantly, developing this type of game will be a dangerous challenge. This chart doesn't tell us exactly why none of Archero's clone competitors have been successful, but we can see that these ideas and variants have been exploited and have not achieved the desired results. This is a warning that you have learned from others, don't repeat the mistakes of the past, waste a lot of time and money, and put yourself under unnecessary pressure.
The above type of visualization will be open to AppMagic's member users and can be used to easily compare the revenue of multiple apps in a single chart. However, you can also use AppMagic's free tools to compare the changes in the ranking of various games in the best-seller charts over time.
One thing we have to keep in mind is that only the revenue generated by payments, subscriptions, and paid installations determines a game's ranking on the best-seller list. Ad revenue can't be detected, and no analytics tool can accurately estimate ad revenue for mobile apps. However, we can still roughly infer the advertising revenue of app downloaders by analyzing which countries their downloaders are mainly distributed. This data is available for free in AppMagic.
In countries like India and Vietnam, a user can contribute about $0.01 (about $0.06) to $0.05 (about $0.32) in advertising revenue if the monetization is properly allocated, while for Russia and Brazil, that revenue is 3 to 5 times higher. Advertising revenue from the richest countries can reach $1 to $2 per user (about 6.36 to 12.73 yuan).
In other words, if you see a game with high downloads, be sure to confirm which countries the bulk of its traffic comes from. If most of the contribution comes from countries with low per capita GDP, such as India, Cambodia or Brazil, don't expect it to have high advertising revenue: in India, for every million downloads, you may only earn $10-20K (about 63,700-127,300 yuan)
To sum up, here's some advice when you're thinking about developing a variant of an existing game: If you really want to make money rather than just spend time developing a product, spend a little more time on monetization, user retention, and hypothesis testing, rather than just being limited to a beautiful art style and the game's core gameplay.
From a market perspective, is the direction I'm trying to go in a dead end?
If we take a look at this chart of how the revenue share of different mobile game genres has changed in the largest Western countries, the first thing to notice is that the area of the red area representing "real-time strategy" games has shrunk dramatically.
In mobile gaming, there's no RTS game in the traditional sense of the PC we know; on mobile, an RTS game is usually a multiplayer game with real-time combat and strategy elements that requires you to control many units, such as Clash of Clans or Island War.
The question is, "Why are games of this genre losing their market share so quickly?" "Is it because there is no fresh blood infusion?" Actually, there is! Are they of poor quality? Not: there are actually a lot of really good games. So what the hell is going on?
When something (a game or a genre – just RTS is an example) no longer grows or shrinks, the reason is always the same: developers can't buy enough traffic to grow while keeping ROMI (marketing return on investment) positive. In terms of one genre, that means that other genres with the same target audience can pay much more for a single install, thereby keeping traffic for themselves.
We must understand that the cost of getting an installation is growing at the same size as others. So, while a game (or genre) with a higher LTV (lifetime value) doesn't get all the traffic compared to the competition, the traffic balance tilts in its favor: the party willing to pay a higher price for each installation gets more traffic. On the other hand, while games with lower LTV can still be purchased to some users, their revenue is often too low to meet the expenses of the game maintenance and marketing team.
After seeing the declining share of RTS games, it should be clear that the genre is currently losing the traffic war on mobile platforms. This means that starting to develop a game of this genre would be an extremely dangerous move.
To add, many game genres are changing from time to time, unlocking plenty of opportunities for the entire new generation of games. So if you don't want to rub shoulders with opportunities, it's important to keep track of rookies of different genres.
How do you track a rookie product when it arrives? For this purpose, some companies offer special tools to track recently released and fast-growing apps, including GameIntel (where you can see the top 5 apps under each subtype of the U.S. Free Apps Ranking) and AppMagic (free and unlimited).
Go to your marketing! Real gamers will fall in love with my game by chance and recommend it to their friends, while the store will support a great game with traffic – that's the way it should be!
Uh, no. This doesn't work on the mobile market. There is almost no free traffic in the store. Even if there is, it is not enough to provide you with the opportunity to make money. Yes, there are some exceptions: some get referrals through non-contract channels, while others use the store's preferred traffic. But you can't take them as the main way to make money.
Yes, there are cases of games in stores that are as popular as viruses, topping the charts while never buying traffic (or buying very little traffic). However, in the vast majority of cases this type of story can be traced back a long time when there were many vacancies in the market – for example, some traditional games (card, sports, board games). We do think of some of the biggest names in gaming, like Minecraft and Roblox, but keep in mind that these are extremely rare examples that deviate from the general rules.
What if you're not familiar with the mechanism of user acquisition? In this case, before you start your development work, make sure that the market** is growing or at least stable, and that the leader of this area changes from time to time to make way for new games. Once you've made your app, go find a partner who knows how to turn an ambitious game into a blockbuster: a publisher that has recently achieved significant success, or a traffic agency that has a good reputation among friends.
remark:
*Refers to the largest mobile stores: the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store
**Refers to a market of type or subtype