How To Be Successful Making Mobile Games

In this blog, I’ll reveal the blueprint that I use when I’m making mobile games, and share tips and advice from over 13 years in the games industry. I’m super passionate about making hit games and I hope you are too!

Read on for my advice about how to research game ideas, choose which type of game you should make and build a high performing team.

I manage development teams at Kwalee, working on new IPs in the Hybrid Casual space. I used to be a professional wrestler but hung up the spandex to follow a dream of working on my greatest passion - video games. In that time, I’ve been designing, prototyping and developing hit games such as TENS!, Jetpack Jump and Draw it. I’m very happy to say that they resulted in over 1 billion downloads of our games.

I’ll explain how we decide which games to make and answer some of the most common questions I get about how to be successful making mobile games.

Consider your competencies

It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and underestimate how difficult it is to break into certain genres. We work in a creative space, so there’s value in bringing passion to the table, learning a part of the mobile games market and pushing ideas forward through good collaboration and communication. However, it’s also easy to get blinded by that passion.

There are key questions you need to ask yourself when you think about making mobile games in a particular genre. Do you understand complex economy balancing? If not, you should steer clear of making an idle empire mobile game, for example.

Do you have an art team able to produce hyper realistic art at a fast rate? If not, you might struggle to sustain a hidden object picture game. There's a significant burden you’ll place on yourself to carry out the live ops and create new content.

Be up front and honest with yourself about what you’ll need to create in order to ensure players have enough content to enjoy for weeks, months and years and what that means for your asset and art requirements.

Do your research

There’s lots of useful tools out there to investigate like Sensor Tower and Game Refinery, though not everyone has access. In fact, one of the best ways to research mobile games is to play the hell out of the competition. This is critical. YouTube videos are common - there’s playthroughs of every level of a game. But even that doesn’t quite cut it.

You need to get your hands on a game, to break down how the game operates, how it influences your decisions as a player. Think deeper about why game designers have done what they’ve done, how they’ve manipulated your interactions and emotions, where the dopamine hits, the journey you’ve been led through and which features punch through the most to keep you playing.

Focus your efforts

Once you’ve considered your competencies and done your research, you can look at the games you’re capable of making. These are likely to be games you’re excited to develop and better understand, as well as games that show opportunities for a newcomer to gain market share. Respect your time and those of your fellow developers, as nobody wants to work on a game that people do not want to play.

Be honest about what needs to be true for your confidence in your initial idea to hold up - you can’t go in blindly thinking you’ll solve every problem. And you’ll also need to question your decisions. It’s a battle to make a game a success - you need to follow through on your confidence and actually deliver it, as well as meet an increasingly challenging set of KPIs.

If you’re playing games, you’ll understand what makes them fun. Dip into trending topics and think of creative ideas for your unique hook. You can also identify issues that get in the way of this fun.

Hire the right people

How do you create a team capable of building hit games? Be scrupulous about the attitude of the people you’re hiring. It’s essential not to let an ego into your team. Humility is the main thing I look for in my team as I’ve seen communication and quality break down because one person isn’t approachable.

Amazingly innovative and creative things have come from a team of compromising creative people who feel like they have a voice. The success we’ve seen - the billion downloads to our name - we’ve all achieved thanks to a motivated, enthused and talented group of people who value people and opinions as much as they value quality.

Good luck making mobile games!

So overall, you have to be very honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. Acknowledge the challenges in the market and make a game that players want to play and you want to make. Play lots of games so you can interrogate the nuts and bolts of what makes them fun, and surround yourself with people that think the same way.

This is not a guarantee of success, but this method is a combination of smart plays that optimise your chances of landing a hit and helps to hedge your bets.

Once you have a game that lives up to your high expectations, if you’re ready to take your success up a notch, the next path to explore is mobile publishing. Get support from a heavyweight publisher like Kwalee and you’ll access our experience marketing, scaling and monetising games with tens and hundreds of millions of players.