Tools and technology in the mobile gaming industry advance at a breakneck pace, and the playbook for getting a sustainable return on investment changes as user behaviors evolve.
Keeping yourself and your team up-to-date doesn’t just happen by accident and investing in education in new tools and technologies is an important part of generating sustainable revenue growth.
Furthermore, the monetization needs of your studio are going to change over time with the lifecycle of your game, and the return you get from monetization or paid user acquisition will ebb and flow.
You’ll need to understand how to adjust your monetization strategy to meet your specific goals at different phases throughout your game’s lifecycle. There may be a point in a games lifecycle when DAU growth starts to slow, and with it the return on investment can change.
A new game with a small user base, for example, may only need to work with a single monetization partner to fill their requests and obtain a good yield. As your adoption begins to grow, it will be worth the effort to add more partners and build a more effective monetization strategy, such as setting various eCPM targets for different geographies.
You’ll need to understand how to balance the number of network SDKs you want to integrate and maintain while also evaluating how those decisions impact your player lifetime value (LTV) and overall yield.
There are critical tradeoffs between how much time and effort you spend monetizing versus developing, especially when considering your game’s size and what lifecycle stage it’s at.
What to consider: Ensure you have the right information to understand when to scale your monetization strategy and time to invest into it. When does it make sense to scale back to ensure you’re getting the best return on time spent?
A developer’s primary focus is building the game itself and any time that’s taken from this needs to have intent and purpose. Choose a partner that can help you better understand the lifecycle of your game and optimize your monetization strategy to increase your return.
Source: Unity Technologies Blog