I’ve been in the gaming industry for about 15 years now, across various roles from Game Designer to Programmer. 10 of those years have been in the mobile gaming space, working on Free2Play titles. I also happen to run my own game development studio and I released more games that I can recall. Every time I get asked this questions, I shiver. How hard is is it to make a mobile game?
Your answer up front:
Making mobile games is easy if you have a lot of experience and resources at your disposal. Especially if you’re not looking to turn it into a business or to make a lot of money from it. Once financials start playing a huge role, when experience is lacking and resources are scarce? Making a mobile game can be one of the hardest things you choose to tackle.
Let’s break the answer above into multiple segments and go over them in detail with practical, yet simplified examples. Experience, Resources and Financials are the 3 core pillars to making and releasing any game. Reading the rest of the article will give you a bit more understanding over the hardships of game development and especially mobile game development.
I’m going to give you an example and use that example for all three parts. The example is somewhat real but the numbers and calculations are overly simplified, but they should give you a rough picture of how hard it is to make a mobile game (in terms of cost, man power, time and effort).
Experience and how it speeds up development
I usually joke that this website has been created as a way for me to pay for my crimes in mobile gaming. In 2020 alone I helped release about 60 games on the App Store and Google Play. And when I say helped, I mean that I was either the main, solo, developer or part of a team of four people working on those games.
My average time from game idea conception to getting it to the market was 1.5 weeks of development. From start to finish. Sometimes I would have a core gameplay prototype done in 1 day. It would take 1 more day to get the assets in, polish it and get it up on the store. How’s that possible?
I have over 15 years of experience of consistently making and releasing games. It initially started with me taking part in 48h gamejams, like ludumdare. From early on I learned to focus on shipping the game I’m working on, fast. And in those 15 years? The points I focus on when making a game never changed. I stay consistent in the way I design and program my games. If you were to look at the source codes, be it across various different programming languages and engines, you would see consistent methods.
I am able to design, program and release mobile games really fast because I have consistently done it over a long period of time. And experience doesn’t just mean – experience with programming said games.
It means experience with shipping them. Making store assets (headers, banners, screenshots), getting in touch with press and knowing what buttons to push and where.
This also means experience with managing people, getting access to assets (like art, music and creative writing), setting up contracts and filling all those google play and app store forms.
To be able to consistently make and release games quick and for it to be as easy as I describe it, it means I need to do the job of an entire team. Let me give you an actual, practical, example of what I mean.
Practical Example of why experience is critical – starting a game’s production
My game
Let’s say you are the main investor in a game development studio. The studio employs me, Jack and Jill as programmers. We also have Jane and Josh as 3D Artists while Joana works with 2D Art. Lastly we have Jameson as a designer.
You, as the person who finances the whole ordeal decide you want to release at least two games in the next 3 months. So we form two development teams. Because I can program and handle game design I am in charge of my own game from start to finish. Jack and Jill welcome Jameson as their game designer. The rest of the art staff produce content for both games.
Let’s say I want to work on a golf game for mobile. My goal is to finish the game in 3 months. In order to this I take the following decisions:
- It must have procedural generated levels. Because I don’t want to spend the 3 months just making and polishing levels for the game.
- The levels should be built out of segments, or blocks. This way I can connect them one after another in order to generate the levels. It should also be pretty fast for the art team to create a lot of blocks with various textures.
- I’ll use Trees, Rocks, grass and 3D models from the asset store for the details. Art team can do minor edits to them to keep the art style consistent.
- The AI in the game should be extremely basic or non existent. If there are any enemies or blockers, they should just be able to move around and be a nuisance.
- The entire game is built around using moves or strokes. The game has a counter at the top of the screen. Every time you hit the ball, you loose a move. Out of moves? You can watch an add to get 5 more moves. Or purchase them with the in-game currency. They also regenerate every minute.
Their Game
Jameson, Jack and Jill have experience with making games, but not as a team. Jameson decides they should do a lowpoly battle royal game. So he takes two weeks to write a barebones game design document. In the mean while, Jack and Jill start writing the code for the game. After two weeks they notice that Jameson’s design requires the use of sniper rifles that can see really far away. They never planned to support that in a multiplayer game with 100 people, as it would mean that, at any point, they need to to make sure even far away players are visible and updated.
Now they have to decide: Does Jameson drop sniper rifles and binoculars from the game or does the programming team change and update the underlining code? If Jameson had any experience with designing multiplayer games for mobile he would have known to factor that into the design. They also lack experience in communicating the goals of the game up front.
Practical Example of why experience is critical – 1 month into development
My game
After about 1 month of work, my game has most of the things needed. You enter the game and you are greeted by a splash screen with the game’s logo, while the assets are loaded. You reach the main menu and the game picks up where you left it. Let’s say you’re just past the first 10 tutorial levels and you play the procedural generated levels, starting at level 11. You can rotate the camera, hit the ball, have it bounce on various environmental models. If it enters the whole, it tells you how many moves it took to complete the level. How many coins you earned. How many moves you get as a reward and it auto loads the next level.
I’m at a point where I can start introducing other mechanics. Let’s say there are golf cards that move about on the field, from block to block randomly. Let’s say I add tornadoes that stay in place and drag the ball in them when it’s close, only to spit it out in a random direction. They are all simple, basic mechanics that rely mostly on good visuals and minimal coding.
All I need from the art team at this point is for some more variety in the environment models, tornado effect and a nice looking cart model.
Their game
The J3 team are 1 month into development. Jameson designed a single big level using a terrain generator. The entire art team and Jameson are working to populate the level with assets and details. In the mean time, Jack and Jill are trying to get all multiplayer clients to be properly synchronised with each other. Because Jameson added a lot of houses and buildings, and he was adamant on all of them having doors, Jack and Jill are scratching their heads at getting the doors to open and close across all clients.
If you didn’t know, doors in games are one of the hardest things to get right. I’m not joking. Here’s a video by VOX, explaining how hard doors are to get right.
Here’s a twitter thread from Damien Schulbert that explain why doors are hated by devs:
If Jameson had experience with multiplayer game design, he’d knew to avoid Doors and not make them an important design element.
Practical Example of why experience is critical – Two months into development
My Game
After two months of development my game is mostly done. I can focus on squashing the remaining bugs, making videos, writing press releases and have the game ready for a soft launch so I can test it properly, with live players. The Art team helped me out by making all of the textures for my game environment grayshaded, meaning that I can apply colour to them across various different levels, making progression really visuals.
I’m mostly ready to see how the game performs on the market and to see if r/androidgaming likes my game. You, as the investor, take me out to launch and we start talking about the next game.
Their Game
Team J3 had to update the design. Their down to matches of at most 32 players. The level map is looking great and you can clearly see the art team did amazing with it. Jameson is also proud of how things are going. Jack and Jill worked hard and got networking to work really well. There’s… just one problem.
They lack content. They have all the mechanics they needed, multiplayer is working, doors are opening properly. Players can pick up a weapon, shoot it, find bullets. They also can equip a vest. And a helmet. Notice I keep using A and singular terms for the items. As if, they only have 1 of each, needed to test and do development. Now they need content. More guns, more weapons, more ammo types, more equipment. A sniper rifle and a pistol isn’t enough.
So for the next month, the entire art team has to spend times designing 3D gun models that don’t require licensing for usage (yes, some guns in popular games actually require a license to use the likeness or the weapon. And name). As well as equipment. And support for character customisation. They’re not out of the woods, with 1 month left and they haven’t even began preparing the store assets, doing videos and getting ready for User Acquisition.
Practical Example of why experience is critical – Game Release
My game
Non-stop Golf is out on the store. It costs us 80 cents per user for User Acquisition. Retention isn’t so high, with a day 7 retention of about 13% but people play 3-4 sessions per day. A lot of them watch ads to finish the endless levels. All in all, the game’s turning a profit slowly. The recoup for the game is around $87 000:
- $9000 my salary for 3 months (at an average of $3000 / month)
- $6000 for the art’s team salary ($3000 / artist per month normally, but they spent very little of their time on this game, compared to J3’s game).
- $72 000 marketing budget, mainly spent on user acquisition.
All in all, in order to recoup your investment in my game it’s not that hard considering:
- About $72 000 means that the UA campaign brought in 90 000 users, at 80 cents per user.
- 13% of those users play for at least 7 days straight.
- They watch an average of 3 interstitial ads / session and the average 5 sessions per day. 11700 users * 15 = 175 500 interstitial ads viewed / day. In a week we have 175 500 * 7 days = 1 228 500. At an average RPM (revenue per 1000 impressions) of $5 we can expect to make a grand total of… 1 228 500 / 1000 * 5 = $6142,5.
At a steady pace, we could make the entire budget back in 14,5 (87 000 / 6000) weeks or about 3 months. The game has a chance to succeed from the looks of it.
Their Game
J3 Online Battle Arena is out! The team somehow did it and through sheer willpower and determination they got the game out in 3 months. Go team! But, the game requires a lot of players to be sustainable. No one wants to play a game like PUBG when it’s just 5 players across a really big map. So UA is important, and costly.
It costs them $2 to bring a user into the game. The only options for watching ads or interstitials is when waiting in the lobby for a game to start or at the end of the game, when they die. A match also lasts a while before 31 players die. Let’s do the math for them, at similar prices to my game (pretending the budget was split evenly).
- $18 000 for Jack and Jill’s salary for 3 months.
- $9000 for Jamesons salary for 3 months.
- $27 000 for the art team’s salary
- $72 000 for the marketing budget, all spent on user acquisition.
So in order for you to recoup your investment into the game, you would have to recoup a total of: $126 000. Let’s break down the user acquisition and revenue as we did with my game above.
- About $72 000 mean that the UA campaign brought in 36 000 players.
- 20% of those players play for at least 7 days straight.
- They watch an average of 4 interstitial ads / session (2 gameplay rounds) and have 2 sessions per day. 4 * 2 * 2 * 7 = 112 interstitials viewed in a week / user. 7200 users * 806 400 interstitials viewed. At an average RPM of $5 we can expect to make a grand total of $4030 / week.
At a steady pace, we could make the entire budget back in 31 weeks, or about 7 months. Now, this applies to having the entire game done in actually 3 months and not more. Just imagine that the salaries would overtake (or eat into the marketing budget) if they’d spent 1 more month developing the game. I painted a pretty picture here for them.
Experience is adamant towards making a mobile game. Experience can help you avoid pitfalls, stay in the budget, know what to release and what to do. But it’s just ONE of the factors.
Managing and having access to Resources
Let’s go back to the previous example with the two games. In my case, I did most of the work, but I had access to the following resources:
- An investor (you), willing to pony up $72 000 to bring in users to the game via advertising.
- A team of artists ready to help me edit my 3D models and graphics in order to make them fit the game and be more consistent in the art style.
- Access to 3D models from an online store, such as Unity’s asset store.
It’s safe to say that these 3 things were instrumental in getting the game done. If we take you (as our virtual investor) out of the picture and we take the 72 000 out of the picture the game could still be done. But that would require me to work, in my spare time on the game. And for the artists as well. Let’s say I won’t even use any artists to help and instead it’s just me and the assets from the store.
Well, the game would still be made. But it’s graphical consistency would suffer. It would look like some things are out of place, or they don’t fit. This would do one major thing: It would decrease the graphical quality of the game, making it look more CHEAP. In turn, this increases the cost of user acquisition. It’s harder to get someone to try to play a bad looking game than a game that is visually pleasing and cohesive.
Let’s go back to the question in this post’s title and update the question.
How hard is it to make a mobile game with no artists and models from a third party store? For me? It’s pretty easy with all my experience in planning and implementing the game.
How hard is it to make a mobile game that looks good? For me, without access to artists to help me get a good overall look for the game? Pretty hard. The bare minimum requirement for me would be to learn to make good looking cohesive textures. This would increase development time from the 3 months in the example above to at least 4-5 months if I knew what I was doing. Even more if I had to learn to use a tool like photoshop or gimp from scratch.
How hard is it to make a mobile game that looks good in just 3 months? For me, without access to artists and experience in making and editing textures? Almost impossible.
When financials start playing a role!
And the same question can be adapted to take you (as our make-believe investors) into account.
How hard is it to make a mobile game and bring 90 000 users to play it without having access to an investor or a user acquisition budget? It would mean I’d have to get incredibly lucky. A huge celebrity should discover the game and want to promote it. The press would have to love it like crazy and feature it everywhere. Apple should decide this is the best game since Candy Crush and feature me on the app store. Google should decide it’s amazing and put a link to it on google’s front page. Aka incredibly hard.
How hard is it to make a mobile game in just 3 months? For me, as a solo dev, with access to resources and $9000 saved up so I can pay my rent, taxes and purchase models? Pretty easy.
How hard is it to make a mobile game in just 3 months without any money saved up? For me, as a solo dev, with access to resources and no money to spend on user acquisition or art assets? Hard. I’d have to get creative with the art style.
Now imagine you and 3 other people want to form a team and make a mobile game. You all have experience and are veterans in your field. These are possible situations you might end up in:
- You all want to work on the game and are doing it for free in your spare time. Doable, if the team synergy is there and can collaborate nicely together. Extremely doable if you don’t care about making money with the game.
- You all want to work on the game but want a salary in order to do it full time. Doable, if you can get an investor or have access to money and you want to fund the game’s development. Not so doable if you take a LOAN and you want to pay it back with the money the game brings back. The game might fail financially and you have a big loan to pay back.
Now picture the same situation but all of you have no experience, no resources AND you take out a loan that you want to pay it back from the money your game will earn. How hard would it be to make a mobile game at that point? With the stress of financial ruin on your shoulders? If you say doable, you’re just as courageous as I was in 2017 when one of my games flopped hard.
Now, go over the previous questions one more time – but substitute my golf game with Jack, Jill and Jameson’s battle royal game. Remove the financing, then the art team. Then, for the experience part, remove Jameson. And then remove Jack or Jill. Or both. And ask those questions all over again.
How hard is it to make a mobile game?
Making mobile games is easy if you have a lot of experience and resources at your disposal. Especially if you’re not looking to turn it into a business or to make a lot of money from it. Once financials start playing a huge role, when experience is lacking and resources are scarce? Making a mobile game can be one of the hardest things you choose to tackle.
That was a long article. I do not want to scare you from picking up game development. It’s one of the most rewarding and creative industries in the world. I’ve been doing it for 15 years and I cannot see myself ever stopping. However, I feel like a lot of people go into thinking it’s easy. And it might be easy, but when resources, experience or financials are scarce, it becomes hard.
There are hundreds of mobile games releasing weekly on the mobile app stores. Let’s say you get all the things right but financials are tight. One of the things you do is you try to recoup the cost of development at any price. So you increase the ads and cripple the game so players have to spend money on it. And that’s how we end up with a lot of the pay2win games out there. That’s how you start focusing on the things that make modern mobile games bad.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If you set out to make a good game and you’re not looking for a financial success, things get easier. We need more passion projects and more art games. We need less commercial intent and more focus on fun gameplay.
The mobile industry has gone haywire and we, as players suffer form it. And of course, me – as a developer, am 100% responsible for the crap that’s out there. Like I said in the beginning – there are at least 60 horrible, ad filled games developed with commercial intent out there – that I’m responsible for.
My job with this blog is to help people looking to get into mobile game development understand the realities behind it. My job with this blog is to help people who love mobile games understand why the situation is the way it is. There’s a page on this blog titled Let’s fix mobile gaming! I invite you to give it a read and then subscribe to our mailing list. More articles like this are bound to arrive.
Where to next?
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