The Hyper Casual (Secret) Formula

Is there a secret way for a hyper casual mobile game to be super successful? Is this something that can even be predicted??

Well, maybe it's not so secret if you have been working with hyper casual games for a while. Also, it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story of the game and its development. After all, it makes a world of a difference if you are a single developer working from home on your spare time, while studying or working another full-time job, or if you are among a huge team in a company that is now steering its mobile game investment towards hyper casual games.

In any case, if the make or break of a hyper casual game could be summarised into a single line, this would be it:

CPI < LTV

How can it be that accomplishing the aim of a project can be summarised into one line only?

Well, you need to understand what those two metrics mean, of course:

• CPI — Cost Per Install — If you are running marketing campaigns to promote your game and advertise it to potential players that might really enjoy your game, then you need to keep a close track to this value; it represents how much you are paying for each individual user to install (and experiment, and hopefully have fun, and stay for a while!) your game.
• LTV — Lifetime Value — How much money can you expect that a single user starting to play today will generate within this game, whether that is originating from IAPs, Advertising, or both (or maybe other sources of revenue that you might have); this value combines all revenue sources into a single value, and represents the estimation of these values throughout all the time the user is staying in your game (that could be just one day, or hopefully a couple more than that).

In fact, what this little formula really means is that the cost of getting one player in your game must be lower than the money generated by one of those players. Simple, right?

This is of course easier said than done. If you are running paid campaigns and broadcasting your message to new potential players, you might not be super confident that a lot of players will be interested to install. If that happens, surely you can expect that the CPI will rise. On the other hand, if you are able to create a very appealing and enticing ad that makes everyone very interested in experimenting your game, then the costs for getting new users will drop.

There are multiple ways to increase your LTV, as well as lowering your CPI. But above all, what you need to keep in mind is that the best way to get users, keep them, and have them generate some revenue, is to create a fun little game, that players will share with their friends (organic installs come for free and can be super powerful!) and advertise on their own!

In the end, you really should always be trying to create the best game possible; if you keep focusing on this, everything else will eventually work out as well!