Mobile Games Forum 2014: Industry Challenges
An article appeared on Gamezebo about how sad everything is in the mobile industry. There are no surprises in it, but it describes the general situation far from optimistically.
So, at the Mobile Games Forum 2014 in London, a morning session was held on what to do if you don’t have millions of dollars to promote the game. The session was held with the participation of companies such as King, Wooga, Mag Interactive, Storm 8, Miniclip, Appsfire and many others.
Recall the problem.
An advertising campaign to launch a potential hit costs from $ 500 thousand. The price is due to the large number of applications in stores. There are just too many of them. The appearance of a new game in most cases remains unnoticed by users. Advertising helps to break into the top. The problem is that once in the top, it becomes necessary to spend no less amounts to keep the project in high positions in the rating, otherwise someone else will take your place and you will have to spend even more on returning to the top.
The situation directly on the App Store is a little easier, because Apple is more actively editing the store’s homepage, aggressively promoting the applications they like, relying less on algorithms than Google. However, both there and there the problem remains.
As a result, during the session, the leading market leaders came to the disappointing conclusion that the game can get to the top in only two ways:
- with the help of word of mouth
- in case of promotion by Apple/Google
The problem is that it is not possible to influence these things in most cases (if we are talking about small teams).
However, the developers of Ruzzle have achieved popularity in an interesting way: their application has the ability to send tricky questions via Twitter. This helped to seriously increase the audience of the project.
The developers from Miniclip, in turn, stated that they did not spend a cent on promoting 8 Ball Pool. They simply promoted the project through their own multimillion-dollar user base.
Is there no such base for cross-promotion? Prepare the money.
By the way, it must be remembered that it is necessary to spend money not only on promotion, but also on retaining users who are constantly “falling off”.
As a result: the winners are those who can afford to stay in the top. Today, these are Supercell, King, big companies like Tencent and, surprise, Facebook, which, according to most developers, is the best platform for targeting.
And what should small teams do?
It seems that the only way out is to look for a publisher, which, in fact, we have already written about more than once.
A source: http://www.gamezebo.com/
