The entire strategy relies on getting your game featured by Apple or Google. A casual mobile game isn’t going to stand out among the thousands of other games released every month if you just post it on random places on the Internet.

In order to get featured, you need to get through to their editorial teams. You could try sending mass emails and LinkedIn connections to try to find an inside contact to pitch your game to (I’ve never done this but I guess it’s worth a shot) but what most of the top casual mobile game developers do is pitch their games to well-known publishers. These publishers meet with the Apple and Google editorial teams regularly, and will pitch them your game in-person. Their connections and reputation are your best way of getting that coveted spot on the front page of the store if your game is mediocre like mine was (I assume yours isn’t much better, or else you aren’t making casual mobile games).

To get your game through to a publisher, you need to pitch them a game which fits their portfolio but also has a unique selling point. If they accept your game, they’ll handle all the business stuff in exchange for a large percentage of the revenue and ownership of the IP, and you just focus on making the game good.

The overall strategy can be broken down into 5 steps:

Comb through the top charts and the featured games on the App Store and Google Play and look for games which are dead-simple to build. As I’m writing this, prime candidates would be games like Fire Up! and Dunk Shot. Find the publishers behind those games and look for the ones which have worked with many different developers. Look for patterns across their portfolio of games. Generally, they all have short gameplay session duration and simple mechanics. There’s isn’t much difference between most of these publishers in terms of what they accept, so if one of them likes your game, chances are there’ll be others which like it as well. Make prototypes fast. Don’t code anything except for the core gameplay loop and keep the graphics simple. It’s fine to rip off other games as long as you have one unique selling point. This is usually a mechanic, but you can also just skin an existing game concept in an interesting way if you have the artistic talent. Send playable builds to all the publishers you researched earlier. Keep your email pitch brief. It shouldn’t take more than a sentence to describe that one selling point. Sign a contract and finish the game. You’ll probably have to make the sales material such as ads and descriptions as well. Pay special attention to the graphics you need to submit to Apple and Google.

My first 3 games were universally rejected, but this was only a few hundred hours of lost work, and I could have reduced this to a few dozen if I hadn’t fallen in love with the first two games and kept adding features to them in spite of the fact that they were getting ignored/passed on by every publisher I showed it too. Don’t do that. Scrap your rejected games quickly and mitigate your losses. Casual mobile games should be easy to make, so starting over is often faster than iterating on a boring or broken design.

When I say your publisher will handle the business stuff, I mean they’ll maximize your chances of getting featured. You might think that there are other avenues of marketing they can help with. There are, but it mostly involves sending sales material to a lot of gaming and tech-related news/review/social media sites. Not very impactful if your game is another casual mobile game. To give a sense of how little this helps, the Google Play version of Frantic Architect only had a grand total of 3,817 downloads. It was submitted to the same sites which the iOS version was (I don’t know what all these sites were, but you can find a bunch of them if you Google the game). It just didn’t get featured on Google Play.

What does seem to help, from what I’ve researched, is cross-promotion between different games in a publisher’s portfolio. Basically, instead of paying a ton of money for ads, you get the ads for free from other games the publisher owns. I don’t have the data for the sources of Frantic Architect’s downloads, but I doubt BulkyPix ever did this for me. It was a mistake to overlook this when I signed the contract, but it wouldn’t have prevented the game from dying.