A lot of articles have already been written about ways to make money on mobile games, but nevertheless, I decided to share my experience and thoughts on this topic and continue to develop the previous article. If you have your own game or maybe even several, or you are at the development stage, or maybe you just plan to make it and of course you dream of making money on it, then click on the button below.
For the first time, I seriously thought about the topic of game monetization about five or six years ago, when they bought a Flappy Bird clone from me with additional mechanics, which I spent about a couple of weeks of development for 1000 greenbacks. At that moment, I didn’t really understand why the guys who contacted me needed it and was surprised at how easy everything went (I give them the source code and rights – they give me money), but as it turned out in the future.
these guys buy games to their taste and at an affordable price for them, and then they add advertising, offers and other things that can bring money to them and somehow attracting an audience, they earn on these games in such a way that they pay off the costs. After buying the game, the guys immediately disappeared and I never saw them again, but I heard from a couple of other developers that they managed to sell their projects in the same way … and the point was that we made games and put them on the showcase without any monetization.
because they didn’t know at all and didn’t think about it, counting on something incomprehensible, but the example that the “craftsmen” showed made me personally think about it more deeply. From that moment I began to study the ways of game monetization in more detail and tried to integrate advertising, subscription, in-apps and everything that could motivate players to spend their money and bring me income while working on my projects and on projects of the company in which I worked as a game designer and I decided to
Compared to the previous part, I decided to choose a more serious presentation (although I do not promise that this will work out) and perhaps you will be able to emphasize something really interesting for yourself and the ultimate goal is precisely in this. This part will be a little longer, so you can make yourself some tea before reading, and in the meantime I will put the next game on the store and let’s go …
Disclaimer
I run a Telegram channel where I write about game design and game development, and if you are interested in my articles and experience, then you know what to do.
In game design, we call this technique a paywall and it is needed in order to cut off or block the audience that is not ready to pay at the right time, and, accordingly, we encourage those who are able to do it to pay. The paywall of this article is that I will write about mobile games, although in my opinion, this can be applied not only there, so I will ask you very much to do without holivars in comments on obvious topics.
The introduction is over and let’s move on to the different ways to monetize your games!
In fact, I divide all the ways to make money from mobile games into three main categories – advertising, in-game purchases and subscriptions, and in the article we will only talk about them. Everyone has already forgotten about the NFT, and I suggest not to consider the direct sale of games, since everything is clear with it, in my opinion this model has long died, and if you really want to know how it is, then I have not seen this series of articles better!
Advertising
Let’s start with it to maximize the paywall of this article… The reality is that advertising brings in a good income (it is rumored that when properly integrated it gives from 20 to 50 percent of earnings) and allows you to reach a payback or be the main source of income for some popular mobile games … yes, and the term “popular” will also have to come to terms with, because if they weren’t popular and there were few players there.
then they wouldn’t be able to earn money, because advertising revenue is counted for clicks and views, and not for the fact of its presence in the game… sorry. Accordingly, those who want to make money try to make popular games and insert ads into them in such an amount that it will bring good results … and I really hope that we will discuss this in the comments most of all.
If someone didn’t understand, then in the previous paragraph I meant mostly hyper-casual or games similar to them, but ads are added not only there, and let’s try to figure out why and how it works below:
The lifespan of hyper-casual games is short, so the ways of displaying ads are aggressive and annoying to get more revenue.
There is a practice that shows an interstitial video every 30 seconds and therefore it seems too intrusive, but I only read about it somewhere or heard about it, so I can not guarantee its success, although it occurs in many hyper-casual games.
According to the experience of my friend who has a hyper-casual “hit” – a decrease in the time after which an ad will be shown does not affect Retention, which means one thing – the target audience is ready to endure it.
Projects more serious than hyper-casual projects are very expensive, so even in a “good” mobile game you can find ads and even completely unobtrusive ones that will generate income for developers to pay for everything.
