Hi all,
Let’s say we have a 100 level offline game.
By doubling rewards and giving second chances , we can theoretically make the player watch 200 ads.
What does that mean and is it enough for a game to be classified as “Successful”?
There is nothing that anyone here can answer about that. This is what you will learn as you operate your game.
Advertisers will pay you a wide range of amounts, ranging from virtually nothing to perhaps something higher.
The cold hard reality is that most games never make more than a few dollars of revenue in their entire lives, and that is even after the developers “do everything possible” in their mind.
Read any mobile gamedev postmortem blog to see what I mean. Only a tiny fraction of games ever get any traction. And just while I typed this, probably six to ten new games were shipped around the world.
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Ad rates vary wildly by local market. No one downloads a game, then plays through all levels in one go, so the number of levels is really meaningless to the question.
Whether the game is a success, depends on your criteria for a success, but you might consider a game a success if it generates more income than the game cost to create and market. If that is your criteria, then it depends on how much money you spent, vs how much revenue. How many ads a user might see is meaningless though, because for all anyone knows your game will have exactly 0 users.
My recommendation would be to put more focus on making a good game which keeps people interested in playing, than on how to monetize the players. If you don’t have a good game, your game won’t get many players.
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That is a massively complex question that boils down to a simple answer.
The complexity: The cost to acquire a user can vary more than 100x according to game type (e.g. hypercasual to casino), and can vary according to country by more than 100x (e.g. USA to Brazil). Add in variations according to genre, platform, and many other variables. Then there is ad type. A banner ad will earn much less than a rewarded video, but you can show more banner ads (although almost certainly not enough to get near the potential for rewarded ads).
The simple answer: LTV > UA. That is the Lifetime Value (how much you earn from a player) is more than the User Acquisition costs (how much it costs to get a user). For success there needs to be a good gap between the numbers as both will vary, and UA will almost certainly go up over time. You are almost certainly advertising to get the volumes needed, hence UA costs, and the pool of potential customers goes down as you get more and more customers from the pool, hence it gets more expensive to find those not yet found.
Your simple answer will depend on the many variables mentioned above, plus even more I haven’t covered.
But having a maximum of 200 ads is likely not going to work, especially as most users will see far less.
Another question is how will you serve ads in an offline game?
A good place to find information about this kind of thing is the blogs of hypercasual publishers. They do share quite a lot of information.
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I will give you another perspective:
Believing that the number of ads a player can watch relates to how successful a game is is what is wrong with mobile games.
Your game is successful if players enjoy it. Not if you shove 20 ads per minute down their throats.
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Did you also hear “to feed the ad into the game and show ads without disturbing the player”?
Why don’t you focus on that part instead of giving me ethical advice?
While I am probably the only one here who is writing the games to transfer its revenue to the poor children.