This post is about how to earn a living by publishing mobile games. There are a lot of things to do, but it’s possible to reach the goal step by step.

Android, catching the money

It is known that anyone can publish both on Google Play and on App Store. So I was interesting if it possible to earn a living by doing that? The core point is to time to time create no too tricky mobile apps and gain enough money to pay monthly bills. Also, it should be possible to delegate part of the work to other people and put less than 40h a week into your business. In fact, that’s the common big dream to work less and gain more, but it looks like it has chances to live for me. And nearly in the second part of January I made up my mind to verify how this idea matches with the real world.

That is review article and I wanna briefly describe what i’m doing now and what i plan to do.

I wanna share details in the future posts. Right now i’m just starting the long journey to mobile apps, and it doesn’t make sense to do detailed review on any particular part of how to create or promote your mobile application, but it do make sense to highlight the steps you need to perform for transformation your idea into the demanded product.

OK, without putting a lot of effort into thoughts, I decided to build the game on Unity3D with built-in ads for Android only. The game, because it looks obvious who and how will use it. With ads, because it seemed to me as the easiest way to monetize the app (spoiler: it yet one of the most efficient way). On Unity, because that’s powerful and free (paid only for moderate business) tool that also can port the game into iOS if required. And Android, because firstly, i have such phone and secondly, because to publish on Google Play you should pay for $25 once and to publish on App Store you should annually pay $99.

Unfortunately, i neither have any mobile development no any game dev experience. I can’t draw computer graphics, i can’t promote anything in the stores, i don’t know how to PR anything anywhere. So i made three decisions.

Game will likely to fail because of the lack of experience, so it’s better to not invest too much into it. There is no guarantees about result without professional’s help and without putting huge amount of effort into the deal. Than more experience will gained than chances for success is higher.

Given this, i can see two orthodox options.

Trust on the professional freelancers and leave promotion to PR agency. In fact, this way is for managers who don’t wanna getting deep into details of how the business works. Do all the stuff on my own and do not but any advertisement for self-promotion.

It’s not quite logical to choose smth average between two points above, so i might choose one of this two options. The first option has quite good chances to pay off in the long run, but it also require sensitive investment on the start. And yes, it only may pay off, but it’s not should pay off. The second way has even higher chances to fail, but the fail won’t lead to losing money, despite the fact that it require a lot of your personal time investment. I came up with the second option, because it might help to understand better what is mobile app development. That knowledge will cost a billion if i will put this experiment onto business rails.

So, I’m going to do all the stuff on my own. And that’s where the first difficulties came up. Had i already tell that I don’t have the most skills from the ones that required for building the apps? That why I decided to do as elementary 2D game as possible. It should be as easy in development perspective as Flappy Bird.

With such thoughts, at the second part of January, I rendered the plot of the very basic game in the mind. Balloons should comes from the bottom of the screen and flies to the top, till they touched the upper end of the screen. User has to pop the balloons till they didn’t reach the top. Looks like a tiny amount of work. Literary in a few weeks i reviewed a bunch of Unity3D video lessons, prototype the first version of the game with ellipses instead of balloons, launched it up… and… and the game was extremely boring.

It forced me to extend the game. I started to note all the ideas that mind do the game a bit more playable. I will pass over the creation the graphic in silence, because in the current prototype i have used either hastily Painted or briefly Googled images. Hopefully, just a few days ago, one kind buddy offered his help with the game and he have some skills with Photoshop, so the future graphics have to be better. Also, till now this game is not my, but it our. Friends and acquaintances helps a lot with the ideas, whereby different bombs and fans appears in the game. They should add some dynamics into the popping process by knocking the balloons out of player’s fingers. I wanna tell more about the final gameplay in the future posts, because it still don’t worked out. And for now, you can get a bit more information there. And yes, the game is already harder than Flappy Bird, but i guess it still “hackable” for one or two persons.

OK, let’s imagine that the game has finished, but there is still one huge issue. How to force people play it? And then i jumped with the both fits into the net and our small team can’t come up with one more or less final solution of how to promote the game. Firstly i thought to use ASO only, but the fact that every single day humanity uploads to the application stores a tons of apps and that it’s unlikely to have the frequent search query that doesn’t already have the hundreds of competitors, changed my mind to perform some advertising the app. Currently we figured out that the amount of types of promoting the game is as high as low my count of pay-less options for adv. To be honest, when this text was almost finished we noticed that Facebook’s adv doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, you can literary promote your page for a few bucks a day and it will take effect for indie-developer. So we’ll definitely use this option. It’s possible to split all the current promotion options on the four chunks, where the 4th one is kind of addition.

Offer the early access for the author of the media centers (journalist, bloggers, streamers, etc.). Author gets the information for the post and advertise the game. Rise up own community anywhere in the net, like this blog, or Twitter page, or whatever, and PR via this resources. ASO. Than better optimization done, than higher the chance that user will find and install us. Create the landing page. Landing is the page that i mentioned above. The aim of the page is to accumulate user’s emails and notify them as soon as game will be released. It will be fair to offer to people a beta-testing opportunity or give some in the app bonuses after official release.

Ryzhka Soft logo

By the way, while this post was written, I made a decision to create some kind of a company name to build an audience in the social networks. Company names Ryzhka Soft, in English it means smth like Ginger Soft ;)

While you haven’t upload your app into the store it make sense to accumulate people in social media and on landing page, but i don’t think that it make sense to do that after release. By the way, we figured out that people tend to join social media group more eagerly in comparison with email subscription on the landing. Yet again, i wanna tell about marketing a bit later, because i will understand better how to promote your own game, and that is still a review article. I just specify a bit that it make sense advertising on the all available Android languages. But in case of indie-development, you have to use English language just to be able to promote yourself in US (usually average american brings more money than any other guys), and if you know some other languages, you may promote on this languages as well, because yet more user is never superfluous. We are going to growth own community on two languages, English and one of our native languages.

We gonna advertise on two languages, but we will localize the game and the game’s description on Google Play on as much languages as we can. The idea is quite straightforward, it easier to perceive content when it written on your native language. Addition translation might lead to higher installation percent among non-native speaker, who, for some reasons, visited game’s Play Market page.

Generally, that’s all that i planed to tell about today. In the future posts i wanna step by step share details of the themes that noticed in this article and some other themes as well. Please, find below the list of the topics that i may tell about in the future. Paste in the comments which of them would you like to read about more and which of them is not interesting for you. Any constructive criticism is allowed :).

List of themes.

How to use Unity3D. How to write on C# for Unity3D. How to create vector graphics. Few tips about which types of games can potentially be popular and for which kind of personality. What is ASO and how to use it. Zero-budget advertising. Can target adv have negative cost?

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