![]() Subway Surfers was the first mobile game to reach one billion downloads on Google Play and the first mobile game to reach four billion downloads across the Google Play and Apple App Store. It also hasn’t been monetized as aggressively as some other titles, especially newer hyper-casual games which have ads every five to ten minutes. With the massive success of Subway Surfers within the first year of release, Kiloo and SYBO Games have not made major changes to the game. Their strategy proved right, as while Temple Run, Jetpack Joyride, and others launched sequels that performed poorly in comparison or split the fanbase, Subway Surfers has continued to add more and more users to its player-base.Īnother bit of rationale was keeping the game similar to what it was at launch. Kiloo, the developer behind Subway Surfers, said early on they had no interest in launching a sequel, as it would split engagement between two games. We have seen similar efforts by Rovio (Angry Birds) and King (Candy Crush) to build a franchise out of a simple mobile game. Imagi Studios, the team behind Temple Run, launched a second edition with new tricks (and monetization), while Jetpack Joyride 2 added more weapons. What separates Subway Surfers from a lot of these other titles is the lack of sequel or added complexity. Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride were the first to reach a mass audience, and one year later Subway Surfers launched offering a similar gameplay experience. The subway surfers players are not the ones you want.One of the first gaming sub-genres to perform well on mobile was the endless runner, combining the simplicity of the touchscreen with low-intensity, repetitive gameplay. Will this be a smart bussiness move? Probably not. So: Can you make a runner that will take players from subway surfers? Sure. Even subway surfers technically monitizes poorly - it simply has a lot of players and therefor makes a lot of ad revenue. You are not going to best ss at its own game: being an easy to pick up, hyper casual game with 10 years of nostalgia and meme culture embedded into it.Īll that being said, runners are one of the hardest free to play genres to monitize. With that in mind, you would be wise to focus on something that ss does not have: a strong meta progression. Today, you need to pour millions into user aquisition to get anywhere. Some fun trivia: the original marketing budget was 75k dollars. However, keep in mind that ss has become an evergreen and therefore doesnt play by the same rules as a new game. Subway Surfers has over 3 billion downloads - so you can absolutely take some marketshare. Small developers very rarely do well in this space compared to more indie-friendly markets like niche PC titles. It's extremely difficult to recommend if you don't already have professional experience in mobile games. How much do you know about the mobile market if you're seriously considering it? It's by far the most expensive and competitive part of games, and it's really not a place to spend money if you don't have a very good idea of what you're doing. Considering 95% of players won't buy anything, you can see why it's a challenging market. An endless runner is going to cost somewhere in the $1-2 range per install if your graphics are good, which means you need to earn at least that much per average player. The whole trick to mobile is making your LTV (lifetime value) exceed your CPI (cost per install). Typically you get people to download a mobile game through ads placed in other apps (including social media). You need a lot of players to make the math in mobile to work out. Even if you get a few hundred (and you can definitely get a few hundred!) conversion rates in mobile games are south of 5%, and even a top performing game isn't making much from just a few hundred people. Literally no one is searching through the list of thousands of games a day and playing a bunch of them, and extremely few people download a game based on social media. Organic traffic for a game by default is basically zero. I have a pretty good understanding of that market. ![]() Noting that I'm not talking about just making a game, but making money on a game, let me turn that back around on you: what makes you think a mobile game doesn't need that much marketing to work? As I said, there are so many game released every day on the store - if it's easy to make money in mobile, why are most of them failing? What are they doing wrong, and what is your game doing to avoid those issues?Īs for me, I worked in mobile F2P for about a decade.
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