According to the “Mobile Gaming – Thematic Research” report, the global mobile gaming market was valued at $98 billion in 2020. During the same year, the global PC and console gaming market value stood at $42.2 billion and $40.69 billion, respectively. This means mobile gaming is already bigger than PC and console gaming combined.
And if the numbers are to be believed, the mobile gaming market will reportedly cross the $272 billion mark by 2030 – signaling a gigantic 11% CAGR.
That’s huge.
As of Q1 2021, over 477,877 mobile games are available on the Google Play App Store – representing a huge 11.9% increase when compared with Q4 2020. Similarly, the Apple App store houses more than 316,802 mobile gaming applications, a 6.21% increase in Q1 2021 over Q4 2020.
With an ever-increasing number of established gaming companies and indie developers launching their mobile games on Apple & Play Stores each quarter, we can conclude that the competition is incredibly fierce.
From discovery to user acquisition to game economy to app store optimization (ASO) to retention to monetization – if you want to scale your mobile game to its full potential, you need to build and implement a solid strategy and revenue roadmap. At the same time, you need to make sure that your game is at its full potential to help you generate maximum impact.
Scaling a game is no piece of cake. Many independent developers don’t have the manpower or resources to compete in this rapidly evolving industry.
“Anyone who has published a game will tell you what a nightmare it can be. From promotion to putting out fires, you need to do a million things. And just about the same number of things can go wrong.” – Danny Day, QCF Design
“Indie dev is a minefield now. To have an extremely good chance at a great level of success, you need to nail everything.” – Paul Kilduff-Taylor’s, CEO Mode 7 Games
A great game does not always ensure players. There’s just too much risk involved going down this road alone. That’s the reason many developers reach out to expert mobile game publishers like us who can provide valuable monetization insights and actionable analytics – having tested, optimized, and launched a large portfolio of games ourselves. At N3TWORK we help unlock your game’s full potential, get it monetization-ready, acquire users and retain existing ones, to generate top dollars.
Let’s dive straight into it 🙂
Key Reasons Game Developers Should
Partner with Mobile Publishers
For ease of accessibility, we’ve summarized the top five reasons developers should partner with an end-to-end mobile game publisher to achieve the best possible results:
- Investment – The capital required to acquire users in order for your game to scale.
- Expertise & Experience – A battle-tested team of experts that have experience scaling games into million-dollar revenue machines.
- Resources – Access to powerful industry-leading UA, retention, and monetization technology.
- Strategic Partnerships – Access to pre-established relationships for app/play store feature placement, & informed influence among ad mediation networks.
- Global Footprint – Ability to scale local and global audiences to increase downloads and monetization efforts.
Let’s touch down on each of these reasons one by one.
Investment
User acquisition costs are the single biggest operating expense for mobile games. And when you consider that mobile games may take anywhere from 6 months to even a year to start recouping any return on their initial user acquisition investment, financial support is imperative.
Some of the most successful gaming companies spend tens of millions each year on their consistent marketing and advertising efforts. However, the amount invested upfront is not always affordable to smaller teams. But upon partnering with the right mobile game publisher, developers can have access to funds that they need to efficiently scale their mobile games.
At N3TWORK, we front the risk of a $10,000 pilot UA trial to acquire users for your game – where we will try to gain insights into metrics behind the game, player behavior, if the users like the game, retention rate and more. No matter what the results are, you won’t have to pay us back – you keep the users, valuable insights, and revenue.
If we decide to move forward together, we’ll provide sustained user acquisition funding throughout the lifetime of your game – as long as we are publishing partners, which is an exciting opportunity for game developers.
Expertise & Experience
That’s one of the major benefits of partnering with a mobile game publisher – you won’t have to go at it all alone. As a mobile game developer, your expertise may lie in game economy, design and other areas focused on developing a brilliant mobile game.
However, it’s critical to have a team full of dedicated experts who can help you with your marketing, creative, advertising, user acquisition, retention, monetization, and other growth-related aspects.
And trust me on this – we understand. We’ve been there. We understand how hard it is for indie developers to strategically scale their games and achieve tremendous commercial success.
Getting your mobile game listed on the Google Play & Apple iOS store isn’t the end. In fact, it’s the mere beginning.
Partnering with a mobile game publishing company will help you unlock access to a team full of experts who’ll guide you throughout the entire process and help you achieve the best possible results by contributing towards your success.
From dedicated professionals with exclusive expertise in user acquisition to data science, you’ll have a team full of dedicated professionals by your side, determined to get your game maximum exposure.
At N3TWORK, we have achieved tremendous success at helping developers scale their games and their game’s lifetime value (LTV). We have teams of dedicated experts who have years of experience scaling mobile games and their user base. Having been in the trenches, we understand how critical it is to have a trusted team to walk this road with you. We are mobile game developers ourselves, and while we wish someone had done it for us, we are grateful for all the learnings and takeaways we have achieved to date.
We’ll serve as an extension of your development team and help you fill any organizational gaps. By partnering with us, you’ll be able to work directly with our dedicated experts spanning:
- User Acquisition
- Ad Monetization + Ad Network Mediation
- Data Science, Player Behavior + Analytics
- Game Commercialization + Game Economy
- ASO & Featuring
- Creative Optimization
Resources
To gain maximum exposure, acquire new players, boost engagement, and generate revenue, you need to have access to a world-class suite of game publishing tools. Alongside this, you need to tap into the power of data to boost your game’s ROI & LTV.
N3TWORK, as a mobile games publisher, has machine learning solutions in place to help indie game developers reach out to their target audiences and player subgroups, a programmatic creative studio that churns out and serves hundreds of iterations of ad creative across various ad networks – allocating and distributing optimal budgets to maximize performance.
You’ll also have access to our suite of proprietary tools that will help you manage and automate your game’s business. On top of this, you can access cutting-edge competitive and market research, data, and analytics to put your venture in hyper-growth mode.
Strategic Partnerships
Partnering with a mobile game publisher will allow you to tap into years of experience and rich network to smoothen the discovery process.
For example, we have well-established relationships with Apple & Google – which helps us win our clients premier marketing placements for their mobile games. At the same time, we have long-established relationships with Facebook, Google, Ironsource, Unity, AppLovin and various other gaming and mediation network giants that help us with our user acquisition and monetization efforts.
Global Footprint
By partnering with a mobile game publisher, you can tap into their worldwide game distribution expertise – allowing you to reach out to your target audience across the globe. At the same time, to gain maximum exposure, it’s critical to have a dedicated team in place who can help you with your game localization efforts.
As you’ll be reaching out to players all across the globe, you’ll likely need a localization strategy in place market-by-market. From building a solid localization strategy to developing a lockit to localizing your code (it’s complicated), a mobile game publisher will help you reach out to your global audience the smart way.
Let’s Scale Your Game Together!
The key is finding the right publisher that offers transparency, creative assistance, with UA, liveops, and monetization expertise. Even better is one with access to technology that empowers you to automate and manage your game’s business.
We are N3TWORK, an end-to-end publishing solution for game makers by game makers. From management to automation, we’ll provide you with everything you’ll ever need to successfully scale your business with the most powerful technology in mobile games.
We want you to focus on creating great games and we’ll turn it into a great business.
Written by:
Director of Business Development, N3TWORK