How to Make a Mobile Game That’s Profitable

To make a profitable mobile game, understanding the market, development process, and gameplay mechanics that contribute to user acquisition is crucial. Player engagement, monetization strategies, and continuous refinement are the keys to generating high revenue, creating hype, and making a profitable mobile game. In 2025, mobile games generated a total revenue exceeding $125 billion, accounting for over 50% of all global gaming revenue. There are over 3.3 billion mobile game players worldwide, making mobile gaming an attractive sector for developers.

Mobile games are easy to access. Mobile phones are in the public’s pockets most of the time, and mobile games are easy to start up. Most mobile game players want a game that is both accessible and engaging. Players aren’t willing to pay high prices for a mobile game. Free-to-play (F2P) casual games like Monopoly GO! and Royal Match dominate the market.

I focus on F2P casual mobile game design below. F2P casual games are mobile games that are free to install and play, designed for broad accessibility and feature light gameplay with short session lengths. They make a profit through ads and in-app purchases, accounting for up to 41% of total mobile game revenue. F2P casual games are the largest single genre segment in the industry. Read on to learn how to make a profitable mobile game.

1. Set realistic scope and expectations

Setting realistic scope and expectations before developing a mobile game involves establishing an idea of what the target market is like, available resources, possible expenses, and project scope objectives. The intricacies of mobile game development require strategy and organization. Research beforehand to identify trending genres, platform tools for monetization strategies, and platform requirements.

First, conduct a market analysis. A market analysis involves studying a specific market to understand its size, trends, customer behavior, competition, and growth potential. Your target market, in the broad sense, is mobile games. Narrow down the scope to get a better idea of what’s currently popular and in demand right now, depending on what concept you have in mind for your game. A market analysis not only helps cement what you want to include in your gameplay but also identifies key competitors within that market.

Next, take stock of your resources. You must decide how much of the budget to allocate to different sectors. There are production costs, development costs, and marketing costs. Consider forming a team to even out the workload. It’s recommended to draft an expenses timeline and set benchmark KPIs along the way.

An expenses timeline is a schedule that visually maps out predicted costs throughout a project. Set a financial period that you stick to: monthly, quarterly, annually (fiscal or calendar years), or a custom period. Group your expenses into categories, like marketing and development, and estimate the amount that you intend to spend on each. Make sure to stay within your scope.

Make adjustments to your budget allocations based on priority when you start spending. Overestimating the available budget and encountering obstacles in the development process are common mistakes. The expenses timeline gives you an early idea of your project scope and expectations in terms of resources. Resources don’t only mean finance, however. Resources include all available tools and personnel at your disposal that help further your mobile game development.

Consider a team to help with production. Different individuals perform different tasks, such as marketing, accounting, and development. Understanding a team’s capabilities and constraints smooths the development process. Expecting someone specializing in marketing to take over coding the system won’t only hinder progress but also be frustrating for all parties. The same level of understanding applies to you if you undertake this as a solo dev. Be aware of your level of knowledge and capabilities, your resources, and their constraints when setting goals. Setting realistic goals strengthens your project scope and reduces the weight of expectations you put upon yourself.

2. Find a good game opportunity

Finding a good game opportunity means identifying an area with potential for audience engagement, market growth, and profit. Find an untapped genre in the market or identify in-demand gameplay experiences to build on. Game opportunities with potential are found during the market analysis.

Market analysis identifies key competitors because it highlights what players are looking for and what they already like in the context of already popular games. Take the endless runner genre of mobile games as an example. The endless runner genre is a subcategory of the action genre. Note that Google, as a publishing platform, is the one categorizing endless runner games under the Action genre. It’s not a reflection of the developers’ design decisions.

Games that made the endless runner genre popular are titles like Temple Run and Subway Surfers. Subway Surfers is currently more popular, despite both games having similar concept ideas. Subway Surfers appeals to players who want a casual, F2P game with multiple platformer elements (running, jumping, rolling) similar to Temple Run. Subway Surfers runs frequent updates, has brighter visuals, and appeals to a broader audience, resulting in higher user acquisition rates.

Conceptualize an idea or make tweaks to an existing concept based on the competitor analysis to appeal to an existing audience. Your mobile game must carry features that are already popular but portray them in a unique or stylized format to be an outlier. Keep up with various mobile OS to optimize your mobile game for multiple device compatibility and expand your reach.

Develop the game with the target demographic in mind. Considering the target market helps you narrow down your game concept theme and what trends to follow and incorporate in your mobile game development. Once you’ve gained insight into market trends, target demographics, and audience engagement, you have found a set of players to empathize with and tailor to.

Your mobile game is going to be F2P, with none of the expected revenue seen in premium game development. Keep track of all possible costs and expenses as suggested earlier. Come up with an expected revenue based on your market size and platform reach. A profitable mobile game has a strong platform reach, achieved through a unique selling point, and encourages players to partake in in-app purchases.

Conduct a platform analysis of distribution stores, such as App Store, Google Play, and Huawei AppGallery. Get an idea of how to best optimize your game for regional marketing, the compliance guidelines in place, and how to increase your storefront visibility from platform analysis. A platform analysis provides early monetization strategies, like using Google Ads as a platform for a pre-registration campaign for early marketing of your mobile game.

Effective marketing alone won’t ensure success, however. A game concept that seems easier to execute based on the market, such as a casual, ad-driven game with a 3+ age rating, poses difficulties because of additional aspects to consider. The age rating of 3+ involves specific legal policies for the ads used, as well as specific marketing guidelines with additional restrictions. A fully paid, premium game with a 12+ rating has fewer restrictions and complications, despite it being difficult to sell a fully paid game by comparison.

Plan out what kind of mobile game concept to execute based on your understanding and knowledge. Finding a good game opportunity is possible via market research. Research generates an idea of where your mobile game concept stands in a competitive light. Next, determine a pricing strategy that is realistic to your personal capacity, production, and platform level to generate revenue.

3. Create a basic prototype

Create a basic prototype to test ideas, mechanics, and concepts before full development. A basic prototype is an early version of the game that evaluates gameplay features, refines the design, and identifies bugs or glitches. Prototypes are used in paid or premium game development and often confused with vertical slices which are used for smaller, casual, F2P mobile games.

A vertical slice is a single playable segment of the game built fully to demonstrate the completed version. Vertical slices are used in player testing, to gauge engagement and usability. As a result, they demonstrate your mobile game’s retention potential and production quality to publishers and investors. Your vertical slice must showcase the elements below.

• Core Gameplay Loop: What makes the game fun and engaging
• Monetization Strategies: How the game makes profit
• Graphics and Sound: Visually appealing design and non-intrusive sound
• Onboarding Flow: Tutorial completion rates and first session lengths from the playtesting

As a whole, vertical slices are used to demonstrate production capability and showcase a trailer of the final product. On the other hand, prototypes are used to test the practicality of game concept ideas and don’t refine art and UX to the same extent as vertical slices. Prototypes are for you and your team to see and test, while vertical slices are for your publishers and investors to see your potential. 

There are many kinds of prototypes. For example, paper prototypes are low-cost and simple, allowing you to experiment with possible characters, levels, and controls without compromising any resource except time. You just need to sketch out the sequences and layouts of your game to help confirm what your mobile game looks like. Paper prototypes are ideal as a starting stage since you brainstorm to refine core concepts early in the design process.

Another type of prototype is wireframing. Wireframing is a structured type of prototyping that visually outlines the game’s interface, navigation, and user experience. Wireframes evaluate the mobile game prototype with more precision and allow you to understand the design elements you need to work with. Even though their blueprints lack detailed graphics, wireframes help visualize the overall flow of your game, making it easier to plan user experiences and game mechanics.

To start, identify the primary idea or game mechanic you want to test. Then create a rough wireframe to visualize your game’s structure. A wireframe lets you create detailed mockup visuals and aesthetic designs, providing an abstract representation of your idea. Then, you use prototyping tools or game engines ideal for quick development, like Unity or Godot, to develop the basic gameplay. 

Test your mobile game prototype and gather user testing feedback. Playtest the prototype with friends or fellow developers, observing how they interact with the game. Ask them to fill out a survey focusing on user engagement levels and user experience. Based on the feedback, make suggested and necessary changes to enhance the gameplay experience.  

Game prototyping is an iterative process and requires you to repeat the outlined steps multiple times before moving on to full-scale production. The repetition of these steps is known as Prototype iterative refinement, increasing your prototype functionality with each run.

You may need to make adjustments to optimize the game for mobile phones, such as increasing the responsiveness of the controls, among other changes. Don’t be afraid of critical feedback, since it shows room for improvement. Once the prototype meets expectations, showcase it to stakeholders, team members, or potential investors. This facilitates support for further development and strengthens your concept.

4. Perform soft launch and technical testing

Performing a soft launch and technical testing refers to establishing how a mobile game performs live while checking how it runs across multiple platforms. Soft launching is a controlled release of the mobile game to a small, targeted market, like a specific region or user group. The goal of a soft launch is to test the game’s real-world performance, gather early feedback from players, and identify bugs.

Developers conduct Alpha/Beta (A/B) testing before a soft launch to test specific features in an isolated experiment (e.g., UI) within a segmented user group. A/B testing is more short-term and poses a lower risk since it’s in a controlled environment. A/B testing is continued during the global launch and after, since it helps fine-tune gameplay features and elements before being released to the entire market. A/B testing measures user behaviour in a controlled environment to indicate any improvements. User feedback from A/B testing highlights issues in the specific features being tested.

A soft launch tests out the entire game in a limited region, focusing on a demographic response, and is conducted weeks to months preceding a global launch. Soft launching poses a greater risk depending on how the mobile game is received by users. In a soft launch, gathering early user feedback highlights what aspects of the mobile game need to be improved on and whether the market response is more favourable than not. A way to gather early user feedback is through in-game surveys, promising in-game rewards like those below.

Surveys ask users for feedback on not only the performance of the game, but also their demographics, helping you deduce your target market and cater to them more effectively. Receiving early feedback from players highlights glitches or bugs that developers missed.

Soft launching allows developers to conduct technical testing, ensuring that the mobile game is optimized to run smoothly across multiple platforms. Developers collect data on where to make changes to improve the gameplay and user experience. They then test the server infrastructure reliability to make sure it can handle the load of a global launch.

Technical testing gives insight into device compatibility and OS compatibility, depending on how well the game responds and presents itself across different screen sizes and mobile models. Setting up the game to deliver active user feedback, where they report issues or bugs, provides information on the frequency of crash reporting. Acting fast to resolve reported issues increases user satisfaction and serves as quality assurance.

5. Iterate to improve retention

Iterating to improve retention means continuously refining your mobile game based on user behaviour and user feedback ratings to keep players engaged in the long run. Retention is a metric that measures player engagement and is important in F2P games since monetization depends on sustained user activity.

Rely on the retention rate to identify levels of player engagement. Retention rates are KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that measure how often players continue to return to a game over time. You’re on your way to building a loyal player base likely to share their gameplay experience with others if players keep returning.

The most relevant retention numbers to consider are below.

• Tutorial Completion Rate: Percentage of players who complete the entire tutorial
• Onboarding flow: Percentage of players who go through all the key stages of the first gaming experience
• Day 1 Retention (D1): Total number of players returning 24 hours after first playing
• Day 7 Retention (D7): Total number of players returning 7 days after first playing
• Day 30 Retention (D30): Total number of players returning 30 days after first playing

There are different benchmarks for the retention numbers outlined above, depending on the mobile game genre. Looking at available retention numbers from competitors to measure your own against gives you an idea of where to start. A more specific way to examine retention rates is by using the metrics CURR, NURR, and RURR.

CURR, NURR, and RURR are advanced retention metrics that are useful to understand weekly user engagement, providing consistent monitoring of your retention rates over the long run.

Examine user retention rates before gauging what impacts them. Rely on user feedback and player engagement activity to start making iterations. Player engagement activity refers to the ways players interact with your mobile game: how often they play, what grabs their attention, and how deeply the gameplay resonates with them. Boost engagement through daily challenges/tasks with rewards, progression systems, live events, and allow player personalization and community building.

Changes don’t need to be all at once and can be based on an Iteration Process Cycle. Conduct a routine review of the retention rates, user feedback, game analytics data, and perform updates. Constant iterations give players something to look forward to while organizing the workload for developers.

6. Upgrade graphics, art, and sound

Upgrade graphics, art, and sound in mobile games to increase player retention, immersion, and overall satisfaction. Upgrading these features is one of the most expensive processes in mobile game development. First, decide what style helps increase user acquisition rates, and then whether it’s a cost-effective option. Pick between abstract, realistic, or cartoon based on community research and feedback.

Use premade art asset stores, especially for common assets like background vegetation, instead of producing art from scratch. Use these asset stores at the beginning of production, as the production cycles are short, so not much time is spent working with basic placeholder graphics (e.g., greyboxes). Placeholder graphics aren’t useful in KPI testing anyway, such as performance and user retention. In the case of mobile game design, the visual style doesn’t need super HD assets; hence, marketplace assets are good to start with.

Make sure the assets you pick are consistent with your art style, with minimal (if any) deviation. Examples of art asset stores are Unity Asset Store, Unreal Marketplace, and GameDev Market. Kenney’s asset packs also offer good-quality products, and bigger game jams recommend asset packs in their FAQs. Global Game Jam, for example, partners with asset companies, which are all on the Asset Store.

In graphics and art, ensuring consistency both stylistically and design-wise creates a brand image, making your mobile game more memorable and unique. Since users play on mobiles, avoid HD assets with high graphics resolution, as they interfere with gameplay experiences. The same consistency must be applied to the sound. Soundtrack thematic consistency and high sound fidelity contribute to immersive player experiences and to building a brand image. Sound contributes to player experience, but mobile game players turn off sound to minimize disturbances. In mobile game design, find sounds that aren’t too intrusive and can be turned off.

7. Optimize monetization

Optimize monetization by identifying the game’s spend potential and integrating monetization models into the game. Since your mobile game is going to be F2P,  there’s no guaranteed revenue, as seen with premium games. Balance keeping players satisfied and generating profits without compromising gameplay or game experience.

First, think about how much players are willing to spend on your game. Come up with possible improvements to make to encourage spending and assess your mobile game’s potential as a profitable project. Then, take a look at what’s valued by players in your mobile game and the price that’s acceptable in exchange. Use different monetization models to increase profitability.

Different monetization models have their own KPIs to gauge success are tailored to user-specific needs based on analytics. User-specific needs refer to situations during gameplay when users are most likely to engage in purchases, during high-value areas. The main purchase-motivating scenarios in F2P mobile games are detailed below.

1. Pain points: Areas in the gameplay where the player could have almost levelled up, but the movements are finished. Offer them paid extra moves to avoid starting all over again.
2. Extras: Sequences in your game that are linked to limited resources (1 jump = 20 energy). Players must pay if they want more. Even secondary content, like skins, can be made immediately available through in-app purchases. Increase their value by making them limited edition, adding to players’ FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
3. Time savers: Players of F2P casual mobile games want something that doesn’t require too much time or effort. Provide them with offers for extra materials to finish an in-game task faster to increase virtual currency circulation. Make an in-game store that sells your virtual currency in bundle deals to incentivize consumption.

Monetize all the areas above, or start off with just one to gauge its profitability. They all fall under In-App Purchases (IAPs), a monetization model. Another monetization model recommended is In-App Ads (IAA), focusing on generating revenue through ads, such as banners and rewarded videos. The advertiser pays you for letting them occupy space in your game, and based on how much it’s clicked on or watched to full length by players, you gain a commission.

Use Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to improve the number of players who engage in the desired action (purchasing, clicking) in your game. CRO is the process of turning players into paying customers, optimizing monetization. CRO works by initially analyzing user behaviour using CRO funnel analysis and then identifying drop-offs.

CRO funnel analysis for mobile games analyzes user behaviour to optimize monetization strategies. Examine how users found your game and installed it, measuring the user acquisition rate. Then, discover whether players completed onboarding, finished the tutorial, and had their first play session. Next, the player engagement levels, like how many levels they progressed in a set period. Afterwards, take a look at the D1, D7, and D30 retention rates. Analysis helps you identify pain points and high-value areas in your mobile game to monetize.

Throughout the steps in the funnel analysis, take note of weak points in your mobile game. For example, if there’s a high drop-off rate during onboarding, simplify the tutorial or add skip options. Run A/B tests to see how the changes are received and gather user feedback. A/B testing is useful in optimizing monetization for user segmentations based on new vs old players, high vs low spenders, and majority vs minority demographics.

Monitor the conversion rate during these stages and calculate the Average revenue per user. Examine whether loyal players are spending more, and which limited offers generate the most profit. Repetitive CRO not only boosts revenue but also improves UX as you’re paying attention to what your players want and actively catering to them.

8. Launch globally

Launch globally once the mobile game has integrated international payment methods, localization strategies, has a large platform reach, and meets all legal and policy guidelines. A global launch opens up the global market and, therefore, exposes the game to a global audience. Implement localized marketing strategies to maximise engagement and incorporate international payment methods with transaction security. Localisation also involves cultural adaptation based on regional preferences, local customs, and language translation.

Begin leveraging influencer partnerships for global outreach and to help generate interest in your mobile game. Select and reach out to influencers that align with your game’s target audience; do this by examining influencer demographics and content style. Popular Twitch streamers, or social media presences that market themselves as specializing in your genre, are a good start. Co-marketing your mobile game with them exposes your game to their audience, maximizing your outreach.

Optimize your mobile game’s app store presence for different markets. Localize app titles, descriptions, and keywords for higher rankings, e.g, adapting content to match regional language preferences. Doing so increases click-through rates (CTR) via enhanced visibility and therefore leads to higher app store rankings. Higher rankings increase app discoverability and boost overall downloads, improving user acquisition.

Ensure your mobile game complies with regulatory compliance, legal requirements, and data protection laws. Regulatory compliance is especially important for user profiles, transaction details, and ensuring the game’s age rating is accurate according to the guidelines. Implementing a global launch takes weeks to months. Alongside preparing your mobile game to launch globally, prepare any necessary legal certificates, licenses, and registration documents.

9. Perform continuous live operations

Continuous Live Operations, also dubbed LiveOps, refers to ongoing management, support, and enhancement of a mobile game after its global launch. LiveOps involves implementing new features, time-limited events, bug fixes, community management, monetization strategies, and tracking player behaviour.

Constant updates and active development encourage player retention, provide incentives for engagement, and increase revenue through events. You increase player engagement and incentivization by constantly introducing new features and gameplay content. Time-limited events motivate engagement through FOMO, and active development ensures bug fixes.

LiveOps also involves continuously sending out surveys to gather user feedback, reports, and opinions. User feedback doesn’t always need to be from your entire player base. Conducting A/B testing with different version updates before full release lets you collect user feedback reports. Incorporate a built-in customer support system to register requests to optimize your updates and improve UX.

LiveOps fosters a community of users for your mobile game, encouraging social interaction, loyalty, and growth through their promotion of your game. Encourage an in-game community through a public chat system where players exchange gameplay tips. Managing the community through basic guidelines (politeness, anti-discriminatory rules) makes it a positive space for your players.

How to make a good mobile game?

Making a good mobile game means creating a successful and profitable mobile game that has a loyal player base. To achieve these aspects, your mobile game must be targeted at a market that wants what you offer. You need to understand the market before development to integrate gameplay that combines popular concepts and in-demand experiences with a unique design niche.

Ensure consistency across graphics, art, and sound to create a brand image, and that they’re optimized for mobile OS. Your development process must consider the player’s perspective first. Putting your spin on the game design reminds them it’s your mobile game, but economic gameplay encourages user engagement and acquisition. Understand what they want, what is easier for them to use, and what is accessible, and cater to it.

Your game concept, theme, and design features must also pair well with your monetization models. When I worked on Mini Car Rush, Mini Car Racing, and Racing Ferocity, everyone was already familiar with different aspects of monetization tools, but lacked extensive knowledge outside of game design areas. Limited understanding of marketing and monetization was the biggest hurdle to a successful launch for my own indie game. Sometimes, making a paid mobile or PC game is easier than producing a F2P mobile game alone.

To prevent marketing and monetization hurdles, design your mobile game from the start with chosen monetization models in mind. I recommend investigating all the external tools and services at the start of pre-production, while making sure you meet all App Store or Play Store guidelines. External tools and services include Ad platforms, billing systems, and attribution tools.

Focus on a unique and robust design. A unique design effectively increases your mobile game’s business potential. From my experience working on Racing Ferocity and Mini Car Rush, an efficient mobile game design has plenty of eye-catching visuals to enhance First Time User Experience (FTUE), audience-driven difficulty design, clear tutorials, and progression systems that feel rewarding. These have the greatest impact on KPIs and are less risky to iterate compared to core mechanics.

Conduct a well-executed launch of your mobile game. Simplify the game design while preserving the game’s identity during technical testing. Even as an Indie developer, I found that skipping this step led to the loss of compelling bits of the game during beta launch. On Mini Car Rush, planning the majority of the game content during pre-production provided clear-cut guides of what the right scope was for us. It’s recommended to plan your content early to have a clear vision and not lose aspects of your mobile game that make it engaging.

How long does it take to make a mobile game?

How long it takes to make a mobile game varies depending on the scope, complexity, and team size. A hyper-casual, simple 2D platformer game can take 2-4 months, whilst a more complex concept with 3D elements has a longer development time, typically taking up to 2 years. The development period itself depends on the developer’s ability and resource availability, not to mention the required amount of planning and market research preceding development.

The average mobile game development time is 3-9 months. Development time varies greatly based on the scope of the game, as the following examples show.

The development time varies based on whether you’re going to undertake the project as a solo developer or form a team. Even then, it depends on your team size, their capacity, and your overall resources.

It took us a year to launch Mini Car Rush, a casual, 3D endless runner mobile game. Although it wasn’t as simple as a hyper-casual game, it also didn’t require the amount of content mid-core games do, making the development time a year. Launching Mini Car Rush could have taken a shorter amount of time with better planning and smoother production processes.

One year of development is only a small portion of the overall work. Games continue to grow through live service with LiveOps. Racing Ferocity was launched 4 years before I joined the live service team. Combining with 8 or so other games, it was popular and profitable enough to sustain a studio with over 100 people.

Understanding policies, monetization models, and marketing strategies affects the timeline, especially if they’re new concepts to you. As an Indie developer, it took me less time to make the game than it did to go through policies and monetization, and marketing tools. I spent 6 months on and off on development, but over a year to implement monetization and marketing strategies whilst following policy guidelines.

How hard is it to make a mobile game?

How hard it is to make a mobile game varies depending on whether a bigger studio is developing it or whether it’s a small indie team. The experience of making a successful mobile game is also different for bigger studios and for indie developers. Mobile game design and development are easier for experienced coders and developers, but some developers might face difficulties with the marketing and monetization aspects.

Marketing and monetization tools are hard to understand because of outdated and incomplete documentation. Complying with store-enforced guidelines, such as privacy, becomes more complex, and a failure to comply often results in game releases and version updates being rejected from the store. I had 40 emails back and forth with Appsflyer, an ad attribution platform, to work around store rejections, only to learn that the version of the tool I was using had a bug that triggered automatic flags by Google Play.

Encountering store rejections during live service, when your game update frequency could be as rapid as 5 days a week, causes you to lose months of time and money. Big studios likely have direct support channels and resources to solve similar issues faster, to avoid incurring large losses.

Understanding marketing and monetization tools requires specialized technical knowledge that falls outside the domain of game programming, such as Android development. Regular updates are not the go-to route for these kinds of tools, as they cause more problems than they solve. The unfamiliar technical territory makes these problems harder to fix. They also require more careful testing and may not sync up with version control automatically. Experiencing the compliance problem taught me to double down on risky avenues, however. In this case, updating these very tools became the risky avenue that required special attention.

Store policies are always updating, some because of global laws, so you need to keep up to date with any policy changes.

Not being up to date affects small-scale developers the most. Many small developers claim that their Google Play Console publishing accounts were banned due to a lack of information, with no way to reinstate them. Google Play lacks technical support for them in such scenarios.

Developing the game alone is not enough. You need to demonstrate high performance metrics regarding player retention, mobile platform device diversity, and quality assurance for bug fixes to get noticed by publishers. Get your KPIs from the ensuing technical testing. Aim to meet them as publishers look at your KPI data before agreeing to support you. Note that at this point, it might be easier to go forward independently, as the publisher might not necessarily give the best deal.