Mobile gaming is booming — But brands dominate

Nobody's a gamer – Everybody's a gamer

Mobile gaming isn’t just thriving. It’s exploding. Hitting $100 billion a year (Norton Rose Fulbright 2023), it’s now half of the entire gaming market. Mobile is officially the mainstream of gaming. So what’s up?

Simply put, because of its own outstanding success, the market is no longer the same market. With 2 million games in the Appstore and thousands more joining monthly, it’s safe to say that it has become a little crowded. New incoming gamers no longer offset this extreme market saturation. In practical terms it means user attention is incredibly fragmented and much, much harder to capture.

On top of this, the casual mobile game audience, one of the largest entertainment audiences there is, don’t even see themselves as gamers in the first place, and will readily swap their playtime with some streaming or social doom-scrolling. If you didn’t know it, the mobile game industry is now part of the global attention economy.

Attention must be earned, not simply bought.

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The fast-follow trap

In this hyper-competitive market, “good enough” just won’t cut it. Fast-following is no longer an easy-win strategy when you have a thousand competitors racing to cut in front of you. Even worse, when every game looks and feels the same, there’s only one lever left to pull: ad spend.

As we’ve seen, this has resulted in the biggest companies pouring in hundreds of millions, brute forcing downloads and attempting to drown out competition, making success nearly impossible for games that lack any tangible differentiation. And if you do make it, what prevents someone from simply copying you and stealing your hard-earned players? A fate happening to more and more small to mid-sized studios.

Copyright won’t save you. Game mechanics can't be protected and probably shouldn't. But one thing can. Distinctive IP. Original characters, stories, and unique worlds are hard and expensive to copy and industry research backs this up: games built on strong, original IP average nearly twice the lifetime player base of titles without it (Newzoo 2024).

And one distinct asset in your arsenal unifies all of this.

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Enter the secret level of mobile game marketing - Your brand

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about how some of the biggest casual mobile games are also some of the oldest. These “classics” have a surprising staying power and consistently top the lists year after year and defend their positions. Are they just better games, or do they have something else in common?

Whether intentional or not, these established games continue to outperform the competition, not because they have great, well-crafted game loops. If that were the case, fast-followers would still see the same success routinely, but they don’t.

The most successful brands in mobile are actually functioning like entertainment IPs. Genshin Impact didn’t just build a game; they built a universe now expanding into anime, comics, concerts, and merchandise. That IP world has pulled in more than $3 billion in mobile revenue alone (SensorTower 2023), faster than almost any game in history.

The real reason these games endure is because they leverage the power of strategic brand building.

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Opposite to the short-term performance marketing toolsets currently at the centre of most mobile game departments, a brand with staying power is built over time, through consistency and with deep intentionality. If you take a look at the most successful games through this lens, it gets incredibly obvious. They have clearly defined and maintained IPs.

Well, all of these top games look quite different you might say. Where’s the consistency in that? That’s seeing it through the “fast-follow lens.” A strong brand cannot be defined by what others do. If anything, a strong brand instead defines the category. This results in a mistake, repeated over and over. If you plainly copy a successful giant without having your own distinctive brand, you risk advertising the entire category, their brand and ultimately their game.

"oh, I thought that ad was for another game!"

The real question you should ask about your brand and marketing is: how do we fit into a category that player look for, yet stand out like a beacon amongst competitors?

Copy a great mechanic, don't copy the brand. Your brand can look like anything, as long as it looks exactly like you. Your brand can act like anything, as long as it acts exactly like you. If that sounds like it’ll take some deep thinking, tough internal discussions, and some hard, strategic choices, that’s because it will. But standing out, on the other hand, might pay off in the millions.

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What’s your story?

“We have a brand, but it’s not doing much for us.”

A misconception we often encounter when meeting with game companies in particular, is the idea that brand is synonymous with visual identity. If you recognize this, you might be looking at one of your biggest untapped marketing opportunities yet.

Your brand is an experience not a logo, the same way your game is not just its graphics. Your brand is the unique story about your game that lives inside your audience's heads. You can’t dictate this story, but you can shape it. With proper nurturing, each encounter with your brand will accumulate into a great epic, bigger than the sum of its parts. Bigger than your game.

Done right, this isn’t just marketing, it’s IP creation. It’s the groundwork for future games but also shows, merchandise, crossovers, and even investor pitches. Hollywood’s current obsession with video game IP (The Last of Us, Fallout, Super Mario Bros, Digiday 2023) proves the point: strong IP travels far beyond the app store. The best IPs become culture.

At BOND we call it your StoryWorlds™. A brand experience that people won’t just notice, but actively seek out and perhaps even fall in love with. The ultimate distillation of what your game is all about.

Every game needs a strong hook, but so does marketing.

When you look at your brand this way, your marketing is simply an extension of your StoryWorld™, rather than a separate activity. Like a creative opportunity. A world built around the game that can be experienced on its own, tailor-made for the channels it will be consumed in rather than forced in. Best of all, rather than the constant one-off activities you are probably doing now, it helps you set a unified direction for your game brand for years to come. No more starting from scratch every single time.

Besides being a very effective way of doing your marketing, it will save you time and money.

One such example is the successful rebranding of Futureplay’s Merge Gardens. In one year the game escaped its performance plateau and experienced an amazing 2000% growth through a 10x'ing of downloads and a doubling in retention (Deconstructor of Fun 2023). See our case.

But most importantly the effect hasn’t worn off. Futureplay now reaps the long-term benefits of a solid brand and IP and best of all, it has fueled a new level of excitement within the studio, who's implementing the brand and story in all levels of marketing and game experience, each new effort further strengthening their brand.

This is how franchises emerge.

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Setting hearts on fire

This kind of long-term brand-building should in no way be seen as an alternative or replacement of short-term performance marketing, but rather as giving your performance marketing machine extra muscle power. In a world where the cost of getting in front of, let alone converting people is higher than ever, you cannot afford to waste any opportunity.

Experiencing your brand must be a joy on par with your game itself, perhaps even more so. If you could convert just 5-10% more people into players with the same media investment, your brand investment will have paid for itself in months, but it will keep benefiting your business far into the future.

Which is why the real question is much bigger than marketing: Are you building an install machine, or are you building an IP?

Strong, protected IP doesn’t just win you players, it wins you the future. Studies show that studios with defensible IP attract more strategic partnerships and funding than those chasing short-term installs (Lexology 2024). In other words: IP is not just creative, it’s financial. Because in today’s market, investors, players, and even Hollywood are lining up behind the latter.

In most studios strategic focus on brand will take a shift in mindset, but so does all change. In an ultra-fast moving industry such as the game industry, investing in staying power might be the best thing you can do, and then maybe a few years down the line, your game too will enter the stage of franchises, those annoyingly stubborn game brands, impossible to knock off their pedestals.

Interested in our StoryWorlds™ approach on mobile game branding, then let’s continue the conversation today.

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Contact:
salla.rehula@thisisbond.com