Web games expanding to the Mobile industry
Anyone in the gaming industry will tell you that the web platform is simply not enough for maintaining a good market grip. If you want your brand to stay in the public’s awareness you have to expand your operation to the mobile arena. However, while these brands are sharp as a knife on the web, when it comes to mobile they are facing the same difficulties and challenges like any small time games developer. Actually, the bigger your product is the harder it is to make that switch to mobile. You have so many factors you need to take under account and of course, you have a brand’s reputation to maintain. So why is it that even with all these difficulties and costs, most big games providers find it more than worthwhile going through with this expansion and what’s the safest way to do that?
Mobile Branding is the predecessor of your success
Let’s first look at some statistics – In 2012 there were 835 million smartphone users. That’s about 12% of the entire world’s population and the numbers go up every year. 64% of these users’ time was spent on mobile apps. Just think of the incredible potential here. It’s not just the conversion you can gain from offering your games in a mobile version, but also the brand exposure you get. People are much more tolerant to mobile games providers than to web ones simply because they have more time on the mobile than on the web. Our mobile phone is with us all the time and the number of opportunities for having some free time to open a game and play it is much higher for a mobile game than it is for a web game. Since the cross conversion rate is high, the mobile actually becomes a new source of traffic to your web platform too.
Will this Work ? Yes it does
But again, with all that potential there are still incredible costs for this switch and as long as you’re on the learning stage you can expect low and maybe even negative revenue growth. There’s a lot of marketing work to be done before you can stand on the steady grounds of the smartphones market. However, while you have to maintain standards and keep a good brand reputation, there’s no reason why you can’t expand to mobile in gradual steps. One of the biggest soft games providers in the UK, is the perfect example for it. This online money games provider wanted to see if the great success it already has on the web can be duplicated to the mobile arena. After an elaborated research on the matter, a budget was set and a strategy launched. The decision was to start with just some of the games and a simple landing page that will contain them all. But where the design and development efforts were minimized, the promotion and marketing efforts were getting a strong boost. The idea was to try and get a picture about the actual potential of the scratch cards and slots games in a mobile version and only if proven successful expand it to more games and a much better design. Today it is at the second stage of expanding its mobile product, after getting positive results from this test.
The conclusion from all this is definitely ‘go mobile’, but don’t go crazy about it. Just like in any other new business direction you’re thinking about taking, you have to go slow; do a thorough research and progress in small steps. Of course, be ready to expand once your initial test has proven to be a great success.
