Attracting users to the mobile game

Many novice developers fall into a rather naive delusion: let's make a game that is fun to play and make money from it. Unfortunately, the mobile gaming market is oversaturated, hundreds of new titles come out every day, the player is able to evaluate the “interestingness” of a dozen games a week. And it is unlikely that your project will be in this top ten, if you do not make additional efforts.

Besides the fact that you are able to make an excellent game or have already done, it is important that someone learn about the very fact of the existence of your game. Despite the fact that Google and Apple have called their catalogs an app store, this is probably not a store where goods are on the shelves and have a chance to catch the eye of buyers, and at best a warehouse where the buyer will never see goods. And you will have to try to show your application to buyers. There are many channels.

Press, reviews, reviews

There are quite a number of thematic resources that live by telling their readers about interesting games, if your game is exactly like this, you have good chances to get publications simply by sending letters to the journalists of these publications. But you should not wait for miracles, the publication of an absolutely laudatory review on iPhones.ru brought me only $ 1500.
In addition, some publications publish development stories from the studios themselves, do not be lazy and write interesting material about how your seven-year-old son took an active part in the development, this story is likely to be published.
Do not disdain popular forums, an interesting topic there, too, can give some flow of users.
In general, S. Galenkin wrote excellently about the interaction with the press. Worth reading .

Virality

Very effective and completely free for you when the players themselves tell you what an interesting game you have.
Conventionally, viral mechanisms can be divided into two parts: when a player posts information about your game through his social services. accounts, and when a player simply tells you about his friends in person.
Let's go in order.
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Social networks

Sometimes you can see that the developers are betting that the player wants to brag about his achievements in the social. networks (everyone loves to brag). In fact, it is not. The desire to brag is caused only by those events that can cause admiration from others. Being a member of the top clan in the Clash of Clans is a reason for boasting, getting another level in the “New Rainbow Ants Farm” is not.
The player will begin to spam only when he realizes that it is profitable for him. In the simplest case, let the player reward the game for spam, even better implement the mechanisms when the presence of friends in the game creates significant advantages for the player, provides additional energy, strengthens the host, speeds up the processes. You can also give the player the opportunity to ask something from friends via social. network, the well-known "Need a drawing of the hammer 10 level."

Word of mouth

They tell friends about good games, you just need to give a reason, the game should have a wow effect, something that makes it stand out from the masses, will make the person who sees talk about it.
On the other hand, it is possible to introduce mechanisms to make it profitable for the player to talk about you. And this is probably the first multiplayer with friends. Excellent ability to play on one device together at the same time.

Featureing

Mobile players are not a core, but a casual audience, most of them don’t go to thematic sites, don’t talk about games with friends, but simply go to the store and buy what they see on the front page. Recommendations in this sense are no worse than tops.
A feature team, evaluating your game, will not play it for several days, most likely the decision will be made within half an hour, so the amazing storyline will not be a plus in this process. It all depends on the graphics, sound, adequacy of the core gameplay. Look at the projects that are featured now, if your project looks no worse, you can hope for this channel.

It is particularly worth noting that not only the first version of the game, but also each update can be fixed. It may well happen that the first version does not get anywhere, and the third update will be a game of the week in dozens of countries.

Significantly reduce the likelihood of fixing negative reviews from previous versions, so think before you release the full alpha bug.

Buying traffic, banners, offers

On this topic, written hundreds of articles from mobile marketers, CPM, CPC, CPI, and so on, for example, here's a good article: How best to buy users?

The problem is that they, as a rule, do not write about the fact that the main buyers of traffic are applications from the top, they also determine the demand, and the traffic costs just enough for the application from the top to make a profit.

Therefore, science does not know the games that would have paid for the purchase of traffic without setting to the top.
The fact is that if you bought 1000 installations in Russia, you have 1000 users in the game for 1620 dollars or $ 1.62 per user, and if you bought 50,000 installations and the application became top 1 free, then it was downloaded for you as well 50,000 of the top, total you have 100,000 users in the game for $ 81,000 or $ 0.81 per user.
So if you have $ 1,000 to buy traffic, you can recoup them only by buying traffic on them in Nigeria and going to the top of Nigeria.
Buying traffic without bringing to the top is a failure of the marketing company.

Traffic from the top

In general, almost all users are here.
The number of jumps on the position in the top depends exponentially, the position in Overall brings on orders of magnitude more than the position in categories and subcategories.
Position in the top is a reward for great product and activity on other channels.