Mobile game developers have spent more on marketing than it costs to develop a big game

On our website, we mainly focus on games on “big” platforms, i.e. PC and consoles, but the truth is that, at least as far as financial profits are concerned, these play a smaller role. Authors earn far more free 2 play mobile titles aimed at the widest possible audience, who simply want to relieve themselves a few times during the day with a quick game on the phone, but have no desire or mood for any longer “steaming”.

That these are completely different worlds with completely different philosophies and principles of operation is best shown by the example of the mobile game Monopoly GO released last year, which is a digital version of the popular board game, whose variant we know in our country under the name Racing and betting.

Although Monopoly first saw the light of day in 1935, its basic principle is so catchy that over 150 million people have downloaded it to their mobile phones, of which roughly 8 million switch it on every day. They are available for free, yet they managed to earn authors more than two billion dollars (approx. 47 billion crowns) in just ten months.

At the same time, they do not look particularly attractive, there is no question of originality, and in general, it is difficult to find anything that would make them significantly different from the hundreds or thousands of similar “clickers” that the Appstore or Google Play digital stores overflow with.

However, there is one major difference, and that is marketing, in which the developers have invested a huge amount of money. Scopely CEO Javier Ferreira recently admitted in a blog post that the promotion of the game cost a whopping $500 million. That’s such a big number that it seems a bit abstract, but for comparison, we can state that it’s more than the entire development cost of the polished PlayStation exclusives The Last of Us 2 and Horizon Forbidden West TOGETHER! At the same time, the first named game also contains such details as the disassembly of each weapon into its smallest parts, while the second one offers a gigantic open world. Monopoly GO! they just have a more or less static game surface and a few forbes effects.

Marketing was so expensive because the studio prepared it for each market separately, taking into account the specifics of the local market (which in this case does not exceptionally mean that the domestic version would be worse and more expensive). This approach obviously paid off and the investment was quickly returned.

This is not very optimistic news for players of “big” games, let’s compare it to last year’s hit Alan Wake 2, for example, which won several prizes from the Game Awards and is the fastest selling game of the Remedy studio, but so far it has not even managed to make a profit .