Surviving Mobile Gaming After COVID-19

Covid made the world notice Mobile Gaming and everyone has spent the past 4 years trying to get a piece of that 🥧 to eat or control it.

Apple with IDFA, China’s crusade against “spiritual opium”, and even a certain development tool partner’s attempt at revenue share and the resulting PR crisis. The list goes on.

That leaves fewer pieces left for developers, particularly with the covid bump dropping away, revenue growth slowing, and everyone and their mother getting laid off.

The companies and games that emerge from this 🔥 will hold to 5 practices:

Make. A. God. Damn. Good. Pie. (Game). 🫳🏽 ⬇️ 🎤

Helldivers, Marvel Snap, Whiteout Survival, and Brawl Stars, the only games breaking out in the modern landscape are….fun to play.

That’s it. If you’re not able to find the fun, your game will not succeed against the incumbent giants that have grabbed the market share.

Data is your boss 👑 – (collect everything)

That’s both quantitative (i.e. D30 LTV is $0.59) and qualitative (i.e. Community hates the new raid boss). If you’re not listening with open ears to your players, if you’re not answering their needs, they will break up with you.. And it won’t be them.. It’ll be you..  Sorry, just facts.

If your spouse told you a thousand times they didn’t want anything other than a pecan pie for their birthday and you lovingly make them a blueberry pie, your favorite, you’ll find yourself in a shouting match about who loves who faster than that pie can cool.

A report by Statista reveals that studios leveraging data analytics experience up to 30% higher revenue growth compared to those relying solely on intuition.

If any of your platform or LTV optimization tooling partners make you pay through the nose for, or otherwise limit your player event collection, it might be time to find a new bakery. 🧑🍳 Ahem…

Act fast or be left in the dust 🏃 💨 – (agility as a force multiplier)

Once your game has launched, within a week your most dedicated players will have burned through all your core content. If you don’t bring them a new slice of that pie they loved so much, they’ll find it somewhere else.  You must keep the content treadmill running at all costs.

Read More on Games as a Service: Everything You Need to Know in 2024

Your players need a perpetual conveyor belt of sweet, hot confections.

Do more with Less ☯️

Your bosses fired everyone. Microsoft claims it laid off only 10%, Sony 5%, same with the good folks at Riot, etc, but if you dig in, these cuts were far larger to certain studios, closer to 30-100%. You now have to pick up the slack and do more with less resources.  READ: Operational Efficiency should be the driving force to keep you honest with any investment in tooling, people, or processes..

Your pipelines need to be spotless. Your backend’s agile enough to adjust and launch things on the fly (btw ask me about Clevertap Gaming’s remote config capabilities 😉 ).  OK – that was my only shameless 🔌 .. Promise!

Optimize every single piece of your production cycle so that your content treadmills nearly run themselves and you can focus on real multiplicative features that your community wants with those saved resources.

You need to be the fastest pie-making studio out there.

Take a peak under AI’s hood 🚘

Look, like it or not, AI’s here. It’s transforming the industry one department at a time. Your competitors are all going to be using it, you’re going to have to or you will face obsolescence.  It’s as simple as that.

Now, there are a lot of ways to utilize AI. I know teams that are using it to optimize their task tracking and note taking, to leave them free to actually work. I know others who are building deep ML to power their dynamic IAP pricing. But the end message is, you have to build and invest in these capabilities.

If you had a robot laying out baking trays, it’d be a hell of a lot easier to make more pies.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I think I made myself hungry..

And be sure to catch me and the CleverTap Gaming crew at GDC this week at booth #S1349 or register to join our event here.