Mobile gaming is booming - But franchises dominate

Nobody's a gamer – Everybody's a gamer

Yet, mobile gaming isn’t just thriving – it’s exploding. Closing in on $100 billion a year, it now makes up 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 App Store and thousands joining weekly, it’s safe to say it’s become a little crowded. New incoming gamers no longer offset this extreme market saturation. In practical terms, that 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, doesn’t even see themselves as gamers in the first place, and will readily swap their playtime for some streaming or social doom-scrolling. If you didn’t know it, the mobile game industry is now part of the global attention economy.

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 the 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.

‍Your new secret performance marketing weapon: 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 surprising staying power, consistently topping the charts year after year and defending their positions. Are they just better games, or do they have something else in common?

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

The real reason these games endure is the power of long-term brand building.

Unlike the short-term performance marketing toolsets currently at the center of most mobile game departments, a brand with staying power is built over time, through consistency and deep intentionality. When you view the most successful games through this lens, it becomes incredibly obvious. They have clearly defined and maintained brands.

Well, all of these top games look quite different you might say. Where’s the consistency in that? That’s the wrong lens – the fast-follower lens. A strong brand isn’t defined by what others do. If anything, it defines the category itself. To repeat: if you copy a giant without building your own distinctive brand, you risk advertising their category, their brand, and ultimately, their game.

Conversely, your brand can look like anything, as long as it looks exactly like you. It can act like anything, as long as it acts exactly like you. If that sounds like it’ll take deep thinking, tough internal discussions, and hard strategic choices, that’s because it will. But the results might be 100% worth it.

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 is the idea that brand is synonymous with visual identity. If this sounds familiar, you might be looking at one of your biggest untapped marketing opportunities.

Sometimes your brand and game story are deeply intertwined, sometimes more surface level, but whereas games are usually built inside-out, focusing on game mechanics, loops, and monetization, your brand is built outside-in, centered on your audience, their lives, and their aspirations.

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 the minds of your audience. You can’t dictate this story, but every encounter is an opportunity to shape it. Over time, these moments combine into a larger narrative, an epic bigger than the sum of its parts, and bigger than your game. This is how franchises emerge.

At BOND, we help game companies find their StoryWorlds™ and build brand experiences that people won’t just notice, but care about and maybe even fall in love with. We call it the “simple idea”. The ultimate distillation of what your game, brand, and studio are all about. This sets the direction for everything we do going forward.

When you look at your brand this way, your marketing starts to feel like an extension of your game – not a separate activity. It becomes a creative opportunity. A world built around the game that can stand on its own, tailor-made for the channels it will live in, rather than forced in. Best of all, instead of the constant one-off activities you’re probably doing now, a clear brand helps set a unified direction for your game for years to come. No more starting from scratch every time. Besides being a more effective way to do your marketing creative, it will also save you time and money.

Setting the hearts on fire – again

This kind of long-term brand building shouldn’t be seen as an alternative or replacement for short-term performance marketing, but as giving your performance marketing machine extra muscle power. In a world where the cost of simply getting in front of people, let alone converting them, is higher than ever, you can’t afford to waste any opportunity.

Experiencing your brand should be a joy on par with your game itself, maybe even more so. If you could convert just 10% more people with the same marketing investment, your brand would pay for itself in less than a year, and it would continue benefiting your business for years to come, only getting stronger with time.

And maybe, a couple of years down the line, your game too will have entered the ranks of franchises – those annoyingly stubborn game brands that are nearly impossible to knock off their pedestals.Interested in our StoryWorlds™ approach to mobile game branding? Get in touch.

Contact:
salla.rehula@thisisbond.com