Help! How Can I Grow My Hyper Casual Game?

You have read everything there is to know about hyper casual mobile games, picked your tools and come up with an interesting and fun idea, and maybe even launched your game! (have you reached your first hundred installs yet? Exciting!)

How to grow it from here, you might be asking. Truth be told, getting a game out and released is only half the story; you also need to make sure that potential interested players are able to find and come across it! And how can this be done? As with everything, and mostly with tech-related things, there's a few different ways to do this. This is in no way an extensive list, but just a few pointers that might help you get on your way, potentially give you a few new ideas, and help you down a path you had not considered before.

Paid Advertising

If you have been playing mobile games for a while, you surely have come across those ads that tell you all about the new games that just came up, while you're trying to play something else, right?

These are called in-app advertising, and can be used for lots of different purposes and themes. Still, the most common content you will be seeing is other games.

The way to do this is to work with one or several advertising networks (for instance, Facebook and Google have their own, and these are among the most used) and create paid campaigns that promote your game to users that are likely to play your game.

The cost for these campaigns can vary a lot, depending on how many players you are trying to get, as well as on their qualities (eg. are these payers in other games? do they come from countries where salaries and cost of living is high?).

Influencer Marketing

A very good way to get your game famous and lots of people talking about it, is to engage and work with some kind of influencer, in your social network / platform of choice (eg. if your audience is older, try Youtube or Facebook; in case it is younger, Instagram and Tiktok might be better options right now).

These people will play your game and let their fans know about it, which could potentially mean lots of new users coming on board! Of course, it makes sense to choose someone that plays games in general, and shows genuine interest in this area. There is no point in having a beauty influencer talking about games, right?! (unless you believe your game has a really considerable overlap with this subject).

Prices can vary wildly, based on fame and prestige of the influencer. The most famous can charge a considerable sum to work with you, but it is also possible that you are able to reach some people that are just starting their influencer careers, and are thankful for the opportunity to get some (reasonable) sum for promoting your game.

Social and Community Management

If paying for ads or influencers or is not an interesting option (or maybe no option at all) the next best thing you can do is to really pay attention to your current users, and create ways to interact and engage with them.

This can be done in multiple ways, but among the most popular you can consider a custom sub within Reddit, or a Discord server. It can look misleading, but it results in a few things:

• your current players remain in the game for longer if they feel they are heard (ie. complaints are addressed, new ideas and suggestions get implemented), while at the same time they can create relations with each other, and even hopefully special events and competitions among themselves;
• happy players are much more likely to share content from your game with their friends, potentially acting as organic ways to get new installs;
• other potential players might come across these pages/servers/content, and install your game out of curiosity.

In effect, what this does is increase retention and virality of your game, which can be seen as free advertising! (even though you must account for the time spent creating and managing these channels)

Publishers

Last but definitely not least, if you have a very interesting game concept, and good metrics to support it, quite likely your best bet is to engage with a Publisher that will publish and promote your game on their behalf.

There are a few different reasons why this could be quite powerful: in exchange for a part of the generated revenue, they will broadcast your game to their existing audience (usually huge), while at the same time having access to beneficial deals with advertising agencies, and maybe a couple of influencers too!

Indeed, you will be forfeiting a percentage of your potential earnings. But picture this: is it better to get 100% out of 10 dollars, or 50% out of 1 million? ;)