Mobile Game Monetization Strategies You Need To Try Out

With thousands of mobile apps flooding the market worldwide, it’s essential for developers to have a feasible and sustainable monetization strategy. Despite present market saturation, the mobile game market is still growing with hardware and software innovations changing the shape of the marketplace every few months.

Worldwide, there’s a sharp rise in smartphone and mobile device adoption and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. It’s estimated that by the end of 2016, 1 in 3 people or roughly 4 billion people will have a smartphone. Countries with large populations like India and China are expected to overtake the US market by next year. With a smart monetization strategy, this gives mobile game developers a nearly limitless market for many years to come.

But despite the size and the potential of the market, why do most mobile game monetization strategies fail? It's due to not understanding your market demographic and trying to force-fit a monetization strategy.

The best monetization strategy depends mainly on what the game is about. But often times we try to fit a monetization strategy on a game that doesn’t really fit in with the user behavior that we want to achieve through the game. As much as we would want everyone to buy our game from the app store outright, to subscribe to our game for a lifetime, purchase all IAPs or allow us to cram as many ads as we can, this simply isn't the reality of the situation. We know that gamers only buy or subscribe to tried and tested games. They only make in app purchases on games that they love and there’s only so much ad time that users can tolerate.

Understanding your target market and how your users would interact with the game serves as the foundation of your monetization strategy. At its core, your strategy must be transactional. You have to give your users what they want. If you don’t understand what your users would want in the game and what motivates them to keep playing and build factors within the game, you can’t expect them to pay you for it.

Not getting enough or the right kind of feedback

One of the biggest limitations of most mobile game marketplaces is that they’re not a reliable source of helpful feedback. For the most part, they don’t actively encourage users to leave helpful reviews. And we all know that users are often more motivated to give feedback when encountering a negative experience than a positive experience.

Without enough feedback, it would be difficult to modify or pivot your game to meet the needs and expectations of users. This is why it might be helpful to resort to other means to get the feedback your need for product development. One way is to have a social media page where you can encourage users to leave reviews or to join gaming boards and communities to solicit feedback. Another way to elicit feedback is to build survey or comment forms, or to incentive reviews by giving select users merchandise or in-app purchases in exchange of feedback.

Failure to pivot

As your game evolves, your monetization strategy also has to adapt or pivot. That’s because in most cases a game can change dramatically as it gets more user feedback. The size and the demographic of your market can also change and what works well for a small community of dedicated gamers may not work for a larger community of casual users. The purchasing power of teenagers is drastically different from that of gamers aged 35 and older. You’ll need different payment systems when you launch on the App Store and Google Play.

Technology can also play a factor when modifying your monetization strategies. Is a large portion of your users on Facebook? Facebook messenger payments might be a good option. What about augmented reality ads?

Adopting your strategy not only makes it sustainable but also helps open up your game to more verticals.

Not adopting IAP pricing and payment system to the market

The great thing about having a diverse, international market is it gives you a wide customer base. But the challenge of having a wide customer base is having to cater to different groups. Gamers in South East Asia, for example, wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for in-app purchases set as US dollar or Euro rates. The preferred payment system may also vary from country to country. You might argue that lowering the price of in-app purchases can affect profitability or product line. But taking into consideration the pricing system of your target market is essential to breaking into that market.

Plus, once you’re able to penetrate that market it would be easier to introduce more games and adopt different monetization strategies, allowing you to recoup your losses over a period of time.

Failure to promote or market the game

Most developers spend their capital on development and neglect to allot resources for marketing and promotion. Competition within the mobile game market is intense. Without marketing, it would be difficult to create the user base you need for testing and feedback, much less build a loyal fan base that would pay for your game and help promote it.

Not saving enough for long term development

Most developers make the mistake of burning through all their resources to launch their beta and a few updates. Gaining brand recognition and a community of loyal users takes time. That means your game has to have the resources to update regularly, respond to user feedback, and introduce localization modifications if needed. Invest in your game’s longevity by allocating for long term survival. You can do it by creating multiple verticals, shopping around for new funding, or setting aside profits for operations.

Viable Mobile Game Monetization Strategies (Pros, Cons and Modifications)

• Advertising

Ads are one of the easiest and lowest risk monetization strategies available to developers anywhere. What makes it attractive is it takes the burden away from the user, which makes it easier to attract more game players by offering the game for free.

However, advertising today isn’t the easy cash cow that it used to be. With all the mobile games open to advertising, it’s easier for advertisers to demand their rates. There’s also the issue of users having a very negative reaction to ads in general, even if the ads themselves don’t interfere with gameplay. The advertisers themselves now are also wary of mobile game advertising as freely as before because of the widespread fraudulent ads clicks.

The proliferation of ads can sometimes affect gameplay which can be a cause for the player to abandon the game completely. One way developers can get around this is to offer an ad-free premium version of the game for a price. But in order to entice a user to get the premium game, he or she must have enough experience in the game to want to continue. This requires achieving a tricky balance of allowing enough ads to pay for the game, not interfere with the experience, but still produce a degree of discomfort or discontent to encourage users to pay for ad removal.

One modification that has been introduced to sustain game advertising is through video ads. With video ads, users are incentivized to watch the ads in exchange for in app purchases or virtual game currency. This strategy helps the game developer to earn through ads while making ads more palatable for users.

Another alternative strategy developers can use is through careful design of native ads. By making native ads part of the visual components of the game experience, users are less likely to be annoyed by them and it reduces the incidence of fraudulent clicks. The disadvantage to this is that the developer would be limited to the type of ads he or she can run within the game and it can be a challenge to create or design scenarios where the ads can be introduced to users.

1. Feeder games

Another monetization strategy worth exploring is to develop feeder games. Feeder games lead users to revenue generating apps or games. One way game developers earn from feeder games is to partner with apps looking for marketing opportunities for gaming. Another way is to develop a feeder game as a teaser and link it to premium games to create an ultimate experience.

The advantage of feeder games is that it can be used as an opportunity to obtain user feedback. And by modifying the game to different advertisers or partners, this strategy is also easily scalable. The challenge here is finding the partners and advertisers since feeder games still aren’t considered as a mainstream monetization strategy.

2. Amazon Underground

Amazon is starting to get into the mobile game market with a novel monetization strategy that’s getting a lot of attention from developers. Through Amazon Underground, developers are paid for every minute users play their game. Amazon earns through advertising and links to Amazon products and part of the profits is shared with the developers.

Publishing through Amazon Underground is still pretty uncommon but is showing a lot of promise. Rovio has recently reported that their profits have tripled since joining the platform as well as the indie game hit Monument Valley.

So make sure to stay informed and consider your options before deciding which strategy is right for your mobile game.