Mobile Game Analysis

What games do you want to develop next?

For those who new to the industry, before any design or development is happening, the team would need to decide on what kind of games they are willing to invest, or what would be the next successful mobile game project to develop? From a business perspective, there are many factors to consider, especially the budgets, the break-even point and how long could the team maintain the game or keep the game sustain on the market. Based on a dataset that contains all strategy mobile phone games in the Apple apps store, we tried to provide some insights about the overall trends of revenue gaining patterns related to game genres, lifespan, and language version. These insights would be helpful for the group leader to have a holistic idea of how different genres of games could have different patterns to gain revenue.

Please imagine that we are all in a product development team. The team has just assigned a large amount of funding...

Revenue from short-term high vs Revenue from long-term advertisement

The first thing we would consider is that “is it worthwhile to maintain a game for a longer time?” The total revenue of a game would be the revenue that the application from every download plus the advertisement revenue over time. As we know that there are games trying to gain most of their profits in the early stages right after they are launched through high number of downloads in a short time. On the other hand, there are games do not have high number of downloads right after the launch, but the advertisements income fills in overtime, and the games need updates and maintenance as long as they survive. Although the team might have sufficient funding, for now, one thing we should consider is that if it is worthwhile to design something that needs a long period to maintain?

Therefore we take a look at the dataset and plot something for applications’ life-span vs. the total possible revenue.

It looks like that if the application can survive over three years, the longer it can keep the maintenance, the higher revenue would get. Considering the fact that we have sufficient funds and a stable team, we can handle the maintenance work, we could design something that last longer.

What kinds of games usually live longer?

Since we decide to do something that may last longer, we need to find out what kind of games usually have a longer life-span. In the below chart, it shows the income composition of the top 9 game genres that have long life-span.

It looks like that among all genres, strategy games have the longest average life-span, and most of their income comes from advertisement.

Therefore, we design a boring a turn-based strategy game and implement it. Then we publish it online!

Some time later, we get another funding, saying they need something having a faster break-even point. That being said, we need to design a game that can earn its revenue as soon as possible, but it does not matter if we maintain it or not later on. And perhaps, we really don’t have much time for this game...

What about something that earns a lot in a short time?

To achieve that goal, we dig up the dataset again and take a look at those games with 1-3 years of life-span, and see what are some genres can bring us revenue.

It seems like that among those with shorter life-span games, Adventure games are the champion. An adventure game is seemingly our next potential project.

It seems like both games are doing well online. We are approached by a supervisor, and he asked if we are willing to develop different language versions for our both of our games so that they could possibly sell better at places where people don’t speak English.

Multi-Language versions or not?

The team leader said we would like to think about it. Then we take a look at the dataset again to see if developing a different language version would be a good idea.

Alright, it seems that developing multi-language versions will increase the revenue for downloads, advertisements, and the total. Based on the results of the analysis, we would like to plan the multi-language version for the application now because we see the business value multi-language version can bring to the company.

This is the end of our hypothetical story. This hypothetical story is just to provide some insight about what would be a good idea to pick what kinds of games to develop, from the aspect of revenue in a very general sense. From the dataset, we could infer that, when games’ life-span is greater than three years, the longer it survives, the more it earns. If we were to plan for a longer life-span for a game, the strategy games would be expected to have more revenue. If we were to plan for a shorter life-span for a game, adventure games would be a good choice. Developing multi-language versions would expect to increase our income comparing to if we only develop the English version. We hope that this article may help. Good luck with coming up with an interesting and profitable game!