Fortnite dominates the competition with more than $2.75 million daily revenue. And, this is just one game, one country, one store. Just think about what revenue of the game will be worldwide and across numerous different devices. 

Let’s have a look at the “Daily” revenues of the handful of popular games. The numbers are from Statista.

Daily Revenue $*: $ +2 Million

Games

• Roblox
• Call Of Duty

Daily Revenue $*: $ +1 Million

Games

• Pokemon Go
• Candy Crush Saga
• Clash Of Clans

Daily Revenue $*: $400K – 1 Million

Games

• Coin Master
• Homescape
• Genshin Impact

A Reminder: “The numbers are for iPhone daily revenues in the USA region.”

Simply put, there has never been a better time to invest and create a Mobile gaming app in the USA and the international market. 

So, if you plan to create a Mobile Gaming App, the first thought to knock on your mind will be – “How Much Mobile Game App Costs”?

While guiding entrepreneurs through the cost evaluation of developing a mobile gaming app, no one is surprised to notice its inclination towards the expensive side. Instead, they are aghast about how much more it costs compared to the conventional iOS app Development. 

So, why do game apps cost more than other apps? 

Simple, because games require much more complex programming, planning and design. However, the development cost varies to a great extent. But, what I advise entrepreneurs and newbies to adhere to is that while there are considerable upfront costs for making a successful mobile gaming app, there can sometimes be high maintenance costs. So, it’s better to be prepped with every know-how of the development process! 

In this blog, I’ll shed light on game development stages, unfurl uniqueness, and finally the cost of developing a mobile game.   

Let’s start!

A 5 STEP ANALYSIS TO MOBILE GAME DEVELOPMENT COST

When you think of working on a mobile game app, the first thought is where to start?

First and foremost, you need to partner with the best app developers to bring your app’s objective or mobile game to an operational reality. Next comes, why do you want to create the app? If the answer is from a business perspective, there are several reasons:

• You want to maximize your customer’s engagement
• You wish to manifold the brand awareness
• You want to increase sales
• You have a great idea that can work wonders. 
• Or, you consider everything monotonous and want to create something. 

#Step 1:  Game Design Document 

Once you are known with the objective of your app, you need to develop a Game Design Document. While, you may consider it like a designing phase, it covers a lot more: 

General Game Description Part

• Game Setting – Where will the game take place?
• Gameplay Mechanics – How the user will interact with the game and description of how points will be earned in your app and how will they help?
• Storyline Of Game – What’s your game about? Is there any story behind it? For instance, Mario’s story was to save the princess who was kidnapped by King Koopa. Still, story is an optional choice, but it helps your players to feel a part of something bigger than merely killing their time.
• A brief description of various levels and how levels differ from each other.

Designing Part

• The app development companies in Dubai, UAE and worldwide make wireframes designed to show how all app’s screens are connected to and interact with each other. 
• Designing part includes the list that outlines all art assets that your game or app might need and a general style guide of the look and feel.  

Business and Technical Part

• Business model or monetization including premium, freemium, ads, in-app purchases or subscription.
• Introduction of the technologies that will be used for the app development.
• The description of all additional systems that the app will be relying on for logging in, analytics, push notifications, marketing, ads etc.

Besides, be clear with your design and expectations from the designers and developers to get what you are longing for. Moreover, you need to answer the following questions to get the best course of action with your game app. 

Which platform are you targeting?

• iOS
• Android
• Web

How many players will it be?

• Single-player
• Multi-player
• Social player (For example like PUBG, which connects the user with other people around the world and they take turns or accomplish the mission)

Updated Frequency?

• Does the game require to be online all the time?
• How frequently does your user need to update the game with new content, levels or live events? 

What markets are you planning to target?

What is your app language? Is there any need to localize it?

The answer to these questions will lay the stepping stones for developers, designers and project managers to understand the expectations and requirements and as a result, will be able to estimate approximate costing, timelines and the milestones. 

#Step 2: Creating A Playable Prototype

To validate the design outlook and feel as well as to see how the idea will work with your potential target audience, the foremost step is to create a playable game prototype for targeted platform (for instance, iOS)

What To Be Included In The Prototype?

• The common design of the game.
• Crucial mechanics that would help the user understand how to play the game.

This step may consume you some time, but the prototype helps you identify the possible weakness before you invest in the real game development and slip-ups missed during the preliminary stages. For example, you can see if people can understand how to play your game, what levels are challenging to pass, or how the game would work provided different user behaviour. 

#Step 3: The Game Architecture 

Irrespective of any project, architecture is one of the most critical steps to allow your app or website to uphold and scale. Considering that the app market is ever-evolving, the top iOS app development companies opt for the latest architecture instead of a monolithic. Eventually, this helps you to introduce updates and changes more quickly, making the project flexible. 

The right architecture helps your project to have streamlined and optimized processes, which, in return, let your game work faster. These days, everyone looks for instant gratification, even a few more seconds of wait time might hurt the user engagement rate. 

Therefore, from the technology side, architecture is a crucial issue because different languages and servers interact. 

#Step 4: Implementation 

The most significant part of prep work is done. Now is the time for game developers to proceed to actual game development. The designer decks all the art elements grounded on the theme described in the GDD, consisting of gameplay, menus, levels, and promotional stuff. The iOS app developers, in the meantime, create game logic which is solely based on the design. 

#Step 5: Test! Test! Test!

Conventionally the testing aspect is not just to find bugs and develop errors. Initially, the QA engineers’ task is to make sure that the gaming app was developed to meet the requirements and is easy to understand by the users. 

One of the beneficial resources for testing is “User Feedback”. In some scenarios, you won’t even suspect that someone might use your app. Which is why you need diverse users for the testing phase along with professionals QA engineers, who are well-versed with distinctive ways of testing your app in context to performance testing, unit and load testing, usability testing and the list goes on. 

TOP MOBILE GAME APP DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGIES 

Probably, by now you must be wondering about the process cost from beginning to launch including the game support? The only honest and definite answer that I can uncover here is “IT DEPENDS”. 

As you are already familiar with the first part of the article, where I have discussed the development stages, developing a game needs answering never-ending questions and setting priorities. Many of the priorities include allocating budget to that specific part of the game. 

Usually game development starts from $1,500 for a simple shooter and can go upto $1,000,000. 

Here’s the difference between a $1,000 and $1,000,000 gaming app!

MONETIZING YOUR MOBILE GAME IS A MUST

Let’s imagine you have already made a healthy investment in the game development aisle. But what about the planning to get that investment paid back? 

The Monetization chapter is based on the comprehensive analysis of ads monetization accumulated from January 2020 to June, rooted on 3000+ cooperative games, 200+ million ad impressions, 25 million + daily active users, one billion+ daily requests.     

The Metric For Scaling Monetization

Considering game type and advertisement style, the rewarded video of eCPM of hardcore games marks the best performance, achieving $47.45 on iOS devices, which is approximately four time to the casual games with popularly used advertising monetization. 

In the same genre of games, eCPM of iOS devices has a competitive edge over Android by 35%. 

eCPM Indicator

In advertising revenue for simple games, interstitial advertising plays the most prominent part in contribution, accounting for 53.82%, followed by 40.47% for the rewarded video. 
While in mid-core games, rewarded videos contribute a little more to improve the gaming experience, making the lion’s share for 73.46%, interstitial and banner ads that affect user’s gaming experience account for a total of 26.54%. The best mobile development companies do not consider interstitial and banner ads for hardcore games, making rewarded video contribution to 99.78% of advertising revenue.

Retention Rate

Considering the retention rate of significant countries, casual games per day retention is at the peak of 36.13%. 

• Casual games are easy to play and adapt by the users.
• User engagement and frequency is high.

Mid-core and hardcore games have eclipsed casual games right from the starting of 3-day retention, and by the 30-days retention period, it’s 4%-7% higher in comparison to the casual games. The gameplay of mid-core and hardcore is complicated than casual games; therefore, users are more stable and loyal. 

LTV (Loan-To-Value) Performance

Are you new to the term LTV?

Don’t worry! LTV stands for LOAN-TO-VALUE ratio showing the revenue value created by users in the game lifecycle. Also, LTV is an appropriate choice to lead the advertising revenue contributed by users in the game. 

The data collected from TopOn, casual games mark the highest LTV in their fancy stages. Although, because of the better long-term retention of mid-core games, their LTV gradually overshadowed casual games. Even the eCPM of the hardcore game is a little higher than other games. The revenue of hardcore game flows from in-game purchase and rewarded videos as they are more used to improve user engagement and manifold in-app purchase rate. 

By now, you have a fair idea of the metric evaluating the monetization strategy of the successful gaming app. 

Thus, it clearly portrays the worldwide in-app advertising and app store revenues in 2020 upped to $53 billion, which is double the revenue collected in 2015. So, here’s a quick insight from Statista to some popular app business models as of 2020, by usage and monetization.

• Subscription Model
• Freemium Model
• Advertising Model
• Other 

From the above stats, mobile app subscriptions produced the most money with the 400 best mobile app developers in the USA and UK. Nevertheless, Freemium apps were ranked in the second position, with a 54% usage rate among many professionals and custom mobile app developers. At the same time, 33 per cent generated the most revenue by this method. 

The Final Words…

Crafting a mobile game app with a top rated mobile app development company is an adventurous journey that skyrockets with a great idea evolving in the epoch. 

Before you venture into the gaming app development aisle, remember mobile game cost is an intricate project where brainstorming and analysis lay the firm foundation. Besides taking the economy and value under sheath, it’s difficult to neglect the development team’s realistic element, project sizes, latest technology stacks and platforms. 

Therefore, the turnkey to its success depends on relatively two questions:

• How will it make life easier?
• Will it make my customers satisfied with the service? 

Answer to either of these questions from experts will eventually follow you to what may be the next BIG THING!