What is Mobile Game Monetization?
Mobile game monetization refers to the process of making money off a mobile game. It includes various strategies and methods that game developers implement to generate revenue for their mobile gaming platforms. However, building a quality mobile game app requires a lot of time, effort, and resources. Not to forget the cost it drives for added features and user experience.
Therefore, make sure your mobile gaming app is profitable enough to reimburse the development cost. Then after, your ultimate goal should be to make money and generate revenue. Although some games become wildly profitable as soon as they get to launch, others may take time to finally blossom, while some games may fail to cover the audience.
The success ratio of any gaming app depends on the quality of the mobile game and the expertise of the developer team to handle gaming app monetization from scratch. Therefore, hire the best mobile game app development company that can help you with all the needful.
How to plan a mobile game monetization?
When you first consult your development team for a gaming app, they will question you about the idea behind the game because the idea is crucial to planning the process. However, finding ways to monetize your game is equally important. But the catch here is to ponder mobile game monetization from its early phases of the game development process. The sooner you start building a game the better you choose the primary monetization model. Once you have completed this stage, you’ve laid out the groundwork for the mobile game app.
The monetization model of your game will create a huge impact on many aspects of the game. For instance, the game’s layout, level of difficulty, features, rewards, and more.
Therefore, think about mobile game monetization during the development, which is the only way to make sure your gameplay and monetization model will work smoothly with each other. It may overwhelm you as a beginner but trust us with this plan you can make or break the entire game.
How to make money out of mobile games?
To get a better understanding of how mobile games can help make money, take a look at the current mobile game market trends. Today, most of the games available online are free-to-play. These games make money by exposing players to micro transactions and/or in-game ads.
On the other hand, paid games are those where players wish to install and play the games, but they need to first make a one-time fee payment. However, in the early days, paid games ruled the mobile game market, but current market trends may not expect mobile game players to pay for gaming.
Therefore, our main focus is on a monetization strategy for free-to-play mobile games. The biggest challenge in making money out of F2P mobile games is to make them work for both game developers and players.
Developers want to earn more money, while players want to enjoy the games for free, which gets tricky to plan the entire process. Many developers follow the money to an extent that they start compromising the player’s convenience and expectations. It ruins their user experience, blocks the players in progress, and results in annoyed players who further uninstall the mobile gaming app.
The golden rule is to balance the user’s expectations and the developer’s skills accurately. Players know the developers need to make money out of the app. Therefore, they expect to see monetization features in the mobile gaming app. As long as developers don’t go overboard with them, they will keep and monetize their players.
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How to monetize mobile gaming apps?
Gaming monetization models have significantly become more complex and varied. The lucrative nature of mobile gaming influences game design and development. Therefore, creators can get profit from their games. But, if you are new to this business, here are the key ways you can monetize your mobile gaming apps:
- Free-to-Play (F2P or FTP): FTP games are free when initially downloaded, but require payment for various upgrades later.
- Freemium: These games are free to download and play but also offer small in-game purchases called micro transactions. Some of these freemium model games include Candy Crush Soda Saga, Clash Royale, and so on.
- Micro transactions: It allows players to purchase additional virtual goods like extra gameplay levels, cosmetic skins, exclusive gears, and in-game currency. In such a mobile game model, the player purchases a limited-edition potion which gives their character special powers to win difficult and time-consuming levels in the gameplay.
- Shareware: It refers to those models that allow players to play a free trial or demo version of the game, but require payment to unlock the entire game license. Shareware offers limited gameplay to the free users compared to the full game. However, this model is somewhat outdated as most mobile game developers embrace the freemium model.
- Up-front payment: This model applies to games that players purchase via one-time payment and then download directly onto their mobile devices. Some of the famous paid games include Minecraft, NBA 2K18, and more.
Summary
Hopefully, this article helped you understand the various aspects of mobile game monetization. To know more about these services and mobile app development services, get in touch with our experts today.
FAQs
How to monetize a gaming app?
- Create a YouTube channel
- Become a video game developer
- Set up a video game coaching business
- Become a video game journalist
- Become a QA tester
- Create video game tutorials
What does monetization of a game mean?
Video game monetization refers to the type of process that a video game publisher can use to generate revenue from their video game product.
How much revenue does a mobile game app make?
An average mobile game app with an impressive freemium monetization model that has less than 50,000 downloads can expect to earn about $1 for every 4 users and may exceed $12,500 in revenue growth.
