How Do Mobile Games Get Popular?

You open up Google Play or the App Store and browse the top new releases. As you arrive on the top free tabs you see games like Count Masters – Stickman Clash (pictured below) sitting snuggly in a top position, with 300k reviews and over 100 Million installs.

It’s not a bad game but it’s certainly not Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto or Need For Speed: No Limits level and you certainly won’t hear your friends talk about it so much in a pub, at the park or during a boring train ride. So how did it get so many installs? How do mobile games get so popular?

Your Answer Upfront:

Mobile games become popular thanks to analytics data backed marketing campaigns. Any game can become popular if it targets a wide enough install base comprised of casual or new mobile gamers while keeping their Cost Per Install Per User smaller than their average revenue from said user. Mobile game popularity has very little to do with how fun a game is and how many gamers recommend it.

In this article we’ll look at the methods through which small and simple mobile games climb to the top of the charts and become so popular. We’ll start by looking at why mobile games need marketing and then explain how game marketing used to work in the past. We’ll move onto the new mobile marketing techniques employed, what they are and how they evolved by contrasting them to the old ways.

By the end of the article you should have a pretty good idea of how a simple game you never heard of is seemingly played by a quarter of a billion people every day.

Why Do Mobile Games Need Marketing?

Mobile games need to use marketing and especially user acquisition tactics in order bring users. There are hundreds if not thousand of mobile games released every. single. day. They all compete for the user’s attention in the app stores, and the app stores have limited “space” in which to display them.

I wrote an article called “Why Aren’t There More High Quality Mobile Games” and in that article I compared both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store to a billboard ad provider. There’s limited advertising space on the billboard and both companies make money from game sales, in-app purchases sales and advertising.

If a game sells 200k copies and another game sells only 10 copies and I keep 30% off of each sale, who do I give advertising space to? The game that sells the most copies and makes me the most money.

We live in a technological world and “virtual space” isn’t such a limited thing. In theory, all games could be displayed on the stores but only a few of them would get most visits, those that appear first, at the top of the page.

Imagine having to scroll for 30 to 40 minutes every day to find a new game. It would be boring, tedious and you would get distracted and miss some great games. So mobile games can’t rely on natural, organic, discoverability.

As such, they need to find ways to acquire new players since the app stores won’t cater to them (initially, we’ll talk about the exception to the case later in the article). This is why video games need marketing, in order to get you, the player, to play them.

How Video Game Marketing Worked Before Smartphones

There’s a ton of crossover between old-school game marketing and modern, especially mobile, game marketing. A lot of the old concepts still apply today but their usefulness has been increased hundreds of times thanks to data analytics built into games. That being said, let’s first go over the traditional methods of marketing a game.

How Old School Advertising Worked

In short, there are a few avenues for marketing that we’re going to cover, since those are the most used.

• Magazines
  • When the computer industry started booming there were a ton of magazines surrounding it. Every magazine had a theme and would cover new computers, new software, games, hardware and peripherals. Magazines were used to market and acquire new users in two ways:
    • via Advertisement: Developers or Publishers could purchase full page advertising space to advertise their wonderful new game.
    • via Editorials and Reviews: Magazine editors and writers would naturally be fans and users of the computers and software titles they were talking about. A lot of them were also gamers and each magazine used to have a category on the latest games where they would review games their editors tried.
• TV Ads
  • Television played a much more important role than it does today and purchasing a 15-30 second ad segment during primetime was a dream achievable only to the biggest game publishers and developers.
  • If you’re curious how a TV ad for a video game looked like, check out the Doom TV commercial for Sega 32X from 1995

• In-Store Placements
  • I brought up the billboard analogy in the previous chapter and it’s pretty cool to see how the transition to “virtual stores” did not bring any change to this tactic. Back in the day you would go to the mall, to a shop or a kiosk to purchase games. You would walk in the door and be greeted with hundreds of titles, each with their own box.
  • Prominent games or games with a big marketing budget would have posters and cardboard cutouts by the entrance and the best selling ones (or the ones that gave the store the biggest cut) would be placed on the top of the shelves, right around a person’s height. They would be featured prominently everywhere.
  • Smaller budget games would be placed on the bottom shelf, almost out of sight or in the back, in areas where users would rarely go by default. Front and center sat the big hitters.
• Online Ads
  • Internet ads weren’t as prevalent as today, nor as dynamic. It would take the form of a banner or a picture, usually coupled with a small flash animation. It wasn’t the main way to advertise games but it still existed. Game communities or gaming specific web sites were the target audience for advertising in this form.
• Word of Mouth
  • One of the biggest drivers of a game’s popularity was word of mouth. People would share demos and shareware version of games with each other using FTP servers, self hosted downloads or by passing burned CD’s and floppies between each other.
  • If a game got a glorious review in a magazine but the game was actually bad this information spread like wildfire amongst gamers. The install base was smaller than modern smartphone user base nowadays but everyone was connected.
  • Gamers were researching games before purchasing them, fact checking review statements, organizing together in communities like old-school forums and user groups. A fake ad wouldn’t normally help that much when pitted against informed gamers.

How Games Became Popular In The Old Days

Advertising helped games become popular back in the day but not as much as nowadays. It offered an install base and if the ad was enticing people would rush to the stores to purchase the game. However a good ad for a bad game wouldn’t get you as far as you would expect back in the day.

The game itself was what gripped the hearts of gamers and the recipe for popularity was a mix of a Good Game + Good Marketing. The player reviews and impressions coupled with word of mouth was a key factor in a game gaining popularity.

Mobile Game Marketing

Now that we understand what drove the popularity of old school games we can look at what changed in modern times. It’s important to comprehend that everything was flipped on its head in modern times.

The biggest driving force behind the changes we’re going to talk about is the adoption of smartphones. The sheer scale of it. In the article titled “Why Are All Mobile Games The Same” I mentioned that most users who download mobile games have no gaming experience whatsoever. A lot of them are new users in a fast increasing market who open the app store and have no baseline for quality.

They don’t know what makes a good game “good” outside of “it’s fun to play it for 5 minutes“, what fake advertisements are and how they are trained into spending a little bit of money to achieve a bit of progress in a game.

In the previous chapter we talked how a good ad for a bad game didn’t get developers very far. Players didn’t want to drop $60 on a new game just based on the ads. They would put on a detective hat, read lengthy reviews and talk with their friends or people in mailing lists about the games they were interested in.

Now that games are marketed as “free”, with a 1 click download and install, the need to do research pretty much flew out the window. “If it’s bad, I’ll just uninstall it”. Nothing lost.

The thing is, seasoned players and gamers do that, but when a big part of the market is on their first experience with gaming in the shape of mobile gaming, their sense of bad isn’t quite finely tuned. And they might stick with a game for 3 to 10 days, play it and move onto the next thing that employed similar tactics for user acquisition as the previous game they dropped.

Coincidently, 3 to 10 days is what most developers target with their retention goals in order to make a profit from their free game. I wrote all about this in an articled titled “How Do Free Mobile Games Make Money”

So let’s see what changed from the previous chapter.

• Magazines
  • Physical magazines aren’t as popular as they once were, with most publications moving towards online publishing vs physical publishing. Advertising is now being done and backed by data analytics with ads being targeted to specific people, making it more cost-efficient for the advertiser.
  • Reviews are still a thing but they’re less technical and in-depth nowadays. We have a category for mobile game reviews where we look at a game and its monetization as our publishing angle but back in the day you would get pages upon pages of in-depth details about a game. From how well it ran to how long it lasted, from gameplay and mechanics analysis to storyline breakdowns. Heck, you would get Character Bios and Lore analysis.
  • To be fair, nowadays a lot of game publishers sway away from sending review copies and prefer regular advertising. They can’t control a review outcome but they can control how cool an ad looks like so why risk it?
• TV Ads
  • Still being used nowadays but mostly by big mobile game publishers or developers with a highly successful game. Not much has changed here.

• Online Advertising
  • This is the most wildly used advertising avenue nowadays. It’s used in games, apps, pre-loaded before videos (on sites like YouTube), on informational websites (like ours), social websites (like Facebook) and just about anywhere with a modern internet connection.
  • Online advertising is leveraged to make a static, dynamic or video ad of a game. If you’re a mobile gamer you see them every 4-5 minutes, between levels or as a way to double your reward.
    • Players click/tap on those ads and are taken to the store to download the advertised game (or product).
    • The developer of the game (the advertiser) pays a little bit of money to the game or app that displays the ad.
  • The thing about online advertising is that advertisers have access to a lot of user data. Let’s say you’re a player of casual games, especially match 3s. An advertiser can choose to display the ad only to players of match 3 games and not to premium gamers. Or to new players or just casual gamers. This makes advertising a lot more efficient than any other advertising medium.
  • By being able to target specific users and having data on how much they play and for how long they can tweak the game so that it costs them less to advertise and bring a user into their game than they can generate from a game.
  • We’ll go into full detail about this in the next chapter where we explain how games like Count Masters – Stickman Clash became so “popular”.

• In-App-Store Placements
  • You can refer back to the billboard analogy in the first chapter on this article. If you skipped it, that’s fine. The main idea is that app stores won’t display the exact game you’re searching for in the first, second or third slot. Instead they display “relevant” games that make them the most money. In some cases the relevant game might be your actual search but not always.
  • Sometimes the first slot is actually reserved for advertised games where developers can pay to be promoted there.
• Word of Mouth
  • Word of mouth advertising is less common than before but when it happens, it rolls with style and big numbers. If you ever heard of Flappy Bird, that’s one game that got extremely successful due to word of mouth, especially via social platforms like twitter.
  • The thing is, modern new mobile gamers are casual gamers. They don’t go to forums and talk about the latest casual and hyper casual game they played or if they do, it’s in a more limited circle.
  • Your grandpa, mom or little sister is a casual gamer if they played one or two games on their phones. How often do you talk about Fruit Slicer 3D Experience during the family dinner?
• Influencer Marketing
  • This one is simple and prevalent on social platforms where users can gain a big following. Think of Instagram, twitter, Facebook. Devs and publishers pay people that have a big following to talk about the game and “influence” people to download them (hence the name, influencer marketing).

Advertising intent and methods have changed wildly. Thanks to a huge install base of new casual gamers (an ever-growing one at that) and the non-existent entry barrier in purchasing a game (free price, 1 tap to install) advertising has surpassed/skipped word-of-mouth and traditional review marketing techniques and instead just targets specific types of players directly.

How do mobile games get popular?

Now, the thing about modern mobile game marketing is that it’s all backed by math, data analytics and built upon the lack of player knowledge on games. What do I mean by math and data analytics? Here’s an example.

Pretend you’re a big game developer and you’re about to release Thunder Kingdom, a free to play mobile game. It cost you $10K to make the game and you want to make that money back + a bit of profit.

You make a video ad for the game to be displayed online and you use an advertising intermediary that has a lot of data on users. You only want to target casual and new gamers because they are more likely to fall for the advertisement. Here’s a simple example of how the situation like this plays out:

• It costs you $0.50 on average to bring a user into the game.
• By displaying ads in your game you make $0.01 per ad shown to a user.
• You need to display 50 ads to make your money back + some more to make a profit.
• You know that on average a user spends 7 minutes in your game and plays 5 levels.
• If you display an ad at the end of every level that’s 5 ads.

You do the math and you learn that your user, on average, need to play a total of 70 minutes of your game. They need to play the game for 10 days in a row, 7 minutes per day for you to make your money back.

You launch the game and check on the progress. Are users spending more than 7 minutes in the game and play more than 5 levels for an average of 7-10 days? Great, you’re doing amazing. If they don’t, you tweak your game a bit more, reduce the level’s complexity, make them last only 30 seconds. Now you’ve doubled the amount of levels the player can play and doubled the amount of ads displayed.

If that’s working, congrats, all you need to do is pump more money in advertising and keeping an eye on your cost per install (the price to bring a user into your game via advertising). Pump in 50c per user, bring back 75c with a 25c profit.

By scaling your advertising budget you scale your install base and suddenly – your game appears to be really popular with 100M installs and hundreds of thousands of reviews. And a decent slice of profit in the pocket.

The only thing game related a game dev or publisher has to do is make sure that game has enough content to keep a player engaged and coming back for about 7 to 10 days. And sometimes they even limit how much a player can play the game for, just to make sure he doesn’t get burned out (bored) too fast by the game. If you’d like to read more about this check out our articles on “Why Do Mobile Games Have Energy” and “Why Do Players Spend So Much On Mobile Games“.

Where To Next?

I write extensively about the mobile gaming industry, their tactics and how greed influences a game’s design, subjects which were brought up in this post. 

I believe that you might be interested in more articles on game monetization. So if you want to stick around, you can check out “How Do Free Mobile Games Make money“, “Why Do Mobile Games Have Fake Ads” and “Why Do Mobile Games Have In-App Purchases“. 

There’s also a monster post (about 4000 words) that answers the question: “How Hard Is It To Make A Mobile Game“. It goes in depth with actual examples on how Experience, Resources and Financials affect the difficulty of developing and releasing new mobile games!

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