Data-driven Method for Mobile Game Publishing Marketing Promotion

Abstract

Marketing is vital for game businesses. However, it is hard to reach the target audiences and choose the right marketing strategies for different user acquisition channels in mobile game publishing. This paper shows how business intelligence can guide independent (indie) mobile game developers to do marketing promotion based on a data-driven method. We apply and extend the ARM funnel model from social game publishing to mobile game publishing and provide a data-driven method to evaluate the marketing promotion performance. First, in order to address indie game marketing challenges, we propose a data-driven method by defining key metrics and applying two different analysis methods for assessing mobile game marketing promotion. Second, we apply our data-driven method to an indie mobile game project and guide the indie game studio to determine the potential marketing promotion issues. Third, we also provide suggestions on improving marketing performance based on analysis results, especially by differentiating between channels. Finally, we summarize how our method can be generalized and used to guide indie mobile game marketing promotion, find highquality channels for user acquisition, improve the marketing promotion effect, and discuss future research work.

Data-driven method development and evaluation for indie mobile game publishing

“…In the second phase, based on the feedback collected from the previous validation and demonstration results, the artifact was redesigned with guidelines to help more indie game developers publish games. This phase brought in another two indie game companies based in Sweden, and we worked with them and addressed their real problems, including marketing promotion evaluation [45] and revenue forecast [46]. In the third phase, based on the previous guideline application, more helpful feedback was collected through interviews with the four indie game companies based in Sweden.…”

Evolution in Tencent’s Game Marketing Model under the Adolescent Model: Case Study of Arena of Valor

“…As of December 2021, the popularity ratio of intelligent mobile devices as the primary Internet access device in China has reached 82.9% among Chinese minors' Internet users in China [10]. So, compared to online games, phone games are more accessible to children.…”