Making money with hypercasual games!
If you have been in the mobile gaming industry for a while, or even just paying attention to it, it should be fairly clear that mobile games can generate incredible revenues, in a few different ways. The two most common of these are in-app purchases (IAPs) and advertising (IAAs).
Have a look at your favourite mobile games, and through a few of the current top ranking games, and you will surely find these two methods being in use. Most common approach is to use a combination of them, but it is possible that some games use one of them exclusively. Some brands really want to come across as a premium gaming experience, and will avoid showing advertising to users. Others are really just going for a very simple and broad gaming experience, and rely on advertising to drive the revenue.
Hypercasual games usually lean more towards the second option, with a big prevalence of advertising revenue. Some will exclusively rely on advertising for revenue, while there’s also plenty of examples of games combining the two sources.
One consideration to keep present at all times, that we have explored on previous posts, is that generally hypercasual games will be able to retain players (meaning, players will keep on playing your game) only for a rather short period of time - usually about a couple of days. Of course some users will find the interest and motivations to keep playing past that (maybe they want to collect all characters or skins) but for the most part you should expect that most people will just play it a few times and then move on to something else.
Taking the low number of expected sessions per player that experiments the game, then it is imperative to think about ways to get these users to generate revenue right from the first few seconds when they start playing. This comes in opposition to other games that can expect most users to remain in the game for longer periods of time, and as such are able to take a softer and more gradual approach to monetising their users.
One such way to tackle this issue is to consider displaying advertising right from the first-ever user session. This could be in the form of a rewarded video (RV) or an interstitial (Int). Or even better, consider using both! Present users the option to engage with a RV to get a better reward from the level/challenge they just completed; if they do not engage with it, then an Int could be presented to still generate some revenue out of that action.
This has become a common approach for many developers. Users having a great experience with the game and enjoying it are more likely to engage with advertising and, if the reward is interesting, everyone can benefit from this!
As for IAPs, the easiest option is to offer an ad-free option, so that anyone enjoying the game and wants to do it without ads interrupting, can also support you along the way. Also worth considering is offering premium skins that only get unlocked with a purchase (this should algo get rid of the ads for those users, considering they’re spending real money here.
It’s always worth considering multiple options here and, of course there’s a great deal of improving advertising revenue that comes with properly setting up, configuring, and even negotiating, with the advertising networks and providers.