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How do you scale your mobile game beyond 1 million players?
Anyone can start a game or an app and get a certain amount of growth. But scaling is hard: you need to find more players, sure, but you also need to expand beyond your initial niche. You probably have to start paying attention to what your competitors are doing. And you’ll learn a lot from new players that will impact how you want your game mechanics and monetization to function.
In this episode of Growth Masterminds, we chat with Sven Jurgens, an independent mobile games consultant, about the challenges and strategies for scaling mobile games beyond 1 million players.
We chat about 6 core challenges when scaling:
- Creative
- Ad partners
- Cash flow
- Monetization
- Tools and tech stack
- Automation
Scaling mobile games: 6 core challenges
Jurgens has spent over 60M euros on ads in his career. He’s now an independent mobile games consultant, but was previously head of performance marketing at LanguageTool, Marketing Lead at Tivola Games, and User Acquisition Lead at AppLike.
Hit play and keep scrolling:
Core scaling challenges
To scale well, you’ll need to meet and beat hundreds of small and giant challenges. Here are 6 of the most challenging for marketers in particular …
Scaling games challenge 1: creative iteration
Assuming you’ve achieved product-market fit, retention is sane, and monetization is working, you’re going to start scaling marketing. And that means scaling creative.
Which brings new challenges.
“ Creatives are the bread and butter of growing, right?” says Jurgens. “So what you usually do is copy/paste what the competitors are doing.”
That’s a bit of a problem. Yes, you want to know what your competitors are doing. And yes, you can save a lot of money in creative testing if you spy on others to find out what’s working and what’s not (hint: creatives that they’re running for weeks, months, or even longer are probably working).
But when you’re scaling mobile games, you also need to start developing your own style, your own creative, your own messaging, your own unique identity. If the word “brand” smells bad by association with big old traditional marketers, call it your game’s persona, or identity, or reputation.
Just doing the old copy-paste thing might get you from A to B, but it’s probably not going to help you scale to the big leagues.
Why?
You’re fighting ad blindness.
“ The user that you show that ad to in your Instagram feed or Facebook feed, whatever feed … they see that a second time, third time, fourth five, et cetera, et cetera,” Jurgens says. “So for them it’s not new anymore.”
That means you’ll burn through audiences faster. And get less in return for your ad dollars. And invest less in your long-term growth.
Scaling games challenge 2: ad partners
When you start marketing your new game, you probably will just use 1 partner and 1 channel. Maybe a couple, but not 10. And probably not even 5.
There’s at least 3 that you can kick off with to start, Jurgens says:
“ I would always start simple … start with the very basics: Facebook, Google, TikTok … so that’s a starting point.”
You instantly have audiences in the billions on each of these platforms, so you’ve got some runway here. But you may want to choose a SDK network, maybe a programmatic partner at some point. Caution: take your time. Let your operation build and grow naturally.
“ People want too many things too early, honestly,” says Jurgens “So usually they say, ‘Hey, cool, I have maybe $100K of spend … here are my seven networks. No, it’s too much.”
One place to consider looking when it is time: rewarded ad networks, which are doing very well these days …
Scaling games challenge 3: cash flow
The goal is to establish a flywheel of growth that speeds up as you go:
- Invest $100K
- Get $150K
- Invest $150K
- Get $225K
- And so on …
But the kicker is the payback period.
Cash is fairly easy to get, Jurgens says, assuming your core mechanics are solidly in place. The challenge: more users and bigger marketing scale can change things in unpredictable ways.
But the core challenge is retention:
“ What you want to have is these stacked cohorts, right?” says Jurgens. “You throw people in and they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow over time. And then, of course, there’s a dying cohort and a churn curve in there. But you want to have that as small as possible, so usually it’s about building a product that’s not losing money: that’s the challenge.”
Scaling games challenge 4: Monetization
You’ve obviously figured monetization out at a certain level, because you’re at the scaling stage right now. But the thing is … things change.
“ The more players you have, the more data you have, right?” says Jurgens. “So when you just start out, it’s an assumption … it’s the best bet. Maybe it could be like an ad placement, it could be monetization, it could be the difficulty curve of your game … it’s an assumption. And the more time you give to your product, the more people you generate and have in your product, the more data you can generate in the app. And what’s then changing is you do what works.”
For example:
- You learn a level is too hard
- A feature leads to churn
- A player upgrade isn’t driving the monetization you hoped it would
And all of that leads to product challenges to ensure that your monetization at least stays as stable as possible when you scale players, or even improves on a per-player basis.
Scaling games challenge 5: tools & tech stack
If you start with 1 ad partner, you may not think you need an MMP. As you add more, however, it becomes obvious that you do.
The same is true with all your marketing and data tools: start simple and grow.
“ Start as simple as possible, right?” says Jurgens. “So it could be like your research tool, maybe you don’t have the money for that: then do that manually. It could be like your competition analysis … your analytics tool. There’s always a cheaper solution, an open source solution that can do the trick for you.”
(Good time to point out, perhaps, that Singular has a completely free tier.)
Try it out!
Scaling games challenge 6: automation
We all do the crappy busy work that takes up 2 or 3 hours that could otherwise be spent making strategic choices. Or to actually use the data that we’ve painstakingly accumulated to make smarter decisions.
So automation is your friend as you start to scale.
“ Automate the boring stuff away,” says Jurgens. “ This is literally just sitting somewhere and look at the data process that you do, and you will be amazed how many stupid things there are. How many times do you iterate on some CSV upload ads through some tool? Or do some comma versus dot notation change, right?”
Jurgens taught himself a little programming to make that happen, but you could probably get ChatGPT to do some of it. Or a team member with a few spare moments, or a gig worker who can code.
“ These small tools, they can … save a lot of time,” Jurgens says.
More on scaling from zero to hero
Interested in reading, listening, or watching more on scaling mobile games? Check out these resources:
- Your first million users: how to rock the cold start, with Hannah Parvaz
- How to scale user acquisition from $100 to $250,000/day
- How to scale influencer marketing: 10 key tips
- How LTV forecasting can help you scale your mobile game 10X faster
- 10 tips for optimizing your growth loop
If you want to go to the next level, though, check out this miniseries we just put together:
It’s 5 sessions with 10 experts on:
- Mastering creative
- Navigating iOS measurement
- Channel diversification
- Retargeting
- Monetization
And … there’s much more in the full podcast
As usual, there’s much more in the full podcast. Check out Growth Masterminds wherever you get audio podcasts, or subscribe to our YouTube to watch them there.
Here’s what you can expect:
- 00:00 Introduction to Growth Masterminds
- 01:37 Journey into Growth Marketing
- 03:55 Challenges of Scaling: Creative Strategies
- 09:20 Ad Partners and Scaling
- 11:39 Financial Challenges in Scaling
- 13:52 Monetization and Data Utilization
- 15:39 Tools and Automation in Scaling
- 18:23 Automate the Boring Stuff
- 19:04 Building Small Tools for Efficiency
- 20:37 Competitor Analysis Strategies
- 25:04 Getting Smarter About Data
- 28:53 Winning Strategies and Trends
- 32:55 Reviving Old School Marketing
- 35:35 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
