How the Game Growth program accelerates your game

You’ve created a mobile game. Now what? How do you make sure it reaches its maximum potential?

Getting the right players after launch is vital for the success of your game, but without the right expertise and funding, it can be challenging and expensive. 

We believe that every indie creator should have the chance to make their game successful and reach the right players – without making compromises when it comes to studio ownership, creative vision, or player experience. With the Game Growth program, we give select indie developers access to best-in-class user acquisition funding and industry experts from some of the top mobile studios in the world. 

In this blog post, we take you through how we collaborate with our Game Growth program partners to accelerate their games and help them build an effective and sustainable player base. While official partnerships are limited, we encourage you to submit your game.

Before we start acquiring users, we need to make sure new players have a great experience when they install your game. If you become a Game Growth partner, we start by optimizing key elements to ensure future lifetime value (LTV) is high and user acquisition (UA) efforts are successful.

Monetization Improvements: Our group of game experts will work with you to improve in-app purchase (IAP) optimization, ad placement, economy balancing, and more. We also help you improve your gameplay balance and core features. This improves the core experience for current players and also helps retain new players in the future.

App store optimization (ASO): Creating an effective app store page is essential for setting up UA for success. We’ll help you optimize ranking features such as keywords and creative assets, all while benchmarking against competitors. Outside of paid UA, this will also improve overall discoverability and organic downloads.

Our team optimizes everything from the game icon to the store description to improve conversion rates. After the fundamentals are implemented, we run regular A/B tests to make sure you’re getting the best results from both organic and paid traffic.

Once your game is optimized, our UA managers build best-in-class campaigns uniquely tailored to your game. We optimize UA for our indie partners by taking a platform-agnostic approach that brings more players into your game and cutting down on upfront cost, management, and fees for attribution. 

Identify channels and buying models: It all starts with the right channels and buying model. We review your game and determine which channels will be most effective for UA based on your key metrics, game type/genre, monetization model, and other factors. Our team explores options across the Unity Ad platform and industry-standard channels such as Facebook and Google UAC.

Predict and maximize revenue: We start running campaigns to bring in new users and use machine learning and data science to predict the LTV of acquired users. This allows us to create and run effective UA campaigns that maximize your net profit.

Specifically, our goal is to maximize the return on advertising spend (ROAS) and the number of installs. We start by estimating the LTV of acquired users as early as possible and how the UA network will react to our bid and budget optimizations. The closer we can predict this, the more effective our user acquisition will be.

Designing advertising creative: Designing and creating awesome advertising assets such as video ads and playables is key for success and early testing. We start with at least 10 distinct concepts and up to 100 variations – including different video edits, sizes, length, and more. These are optimized for each channel and used in the upcoming UA campaigns.

The right creative can be a huge factor when lowering the cost of bringing in new players. We combine our marketing experts and data expertise to ensure your creative is optimized for the best return on ad spend (ROAS).

Now it’s time to hit the gas and bring new players into your game. Our goal is to bring in as many high-value players as possible – fans that will stick with your game (and studio) long-term.

 Increase lifetime value : As we start to run more and more UA campaigns, our team works continuously to improve LTV. We work directly with you to identify key channels, locales, and audiences to double down on what’s most effective.

Optimize K-factor: While paid user acquisition is the focus, we work with you extensively to increase organic traffic alongside our campaigns – this is known as the “K-factor.” Our team will use tactics such as optimizing your app store and improving social sharing features to ensure that newly acquired users will also bring in organic players.

Improve core game elements: We can’t stress enough the importance of optimizing your core game. Alongside our UA campaigns, we will be continuously improving core user loops, user interface (UI), menus, and systems in your game. This is hugely important for improving the experience for existing players and making sure new users stick around.

Test, iterate, and test again: Great user acquisition is always an ongoing process. Our team of UA experts will work with you regularly to test the effectiveness of campaigns and develop new ways to improve the ROAS.

Whether you’re a veteran indie developer or new on the scene, the Game Growth program gives you access to the expertise to take your game to the next level. All you need is a live free-to-play game on iOS or Android to get started – learn more about the Game Growth program here.