The new rules for navigating ‘that damn App Store’

More than 1.8 billion people are playing mobile games around the world.

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The top 20 games on mobile today is almost exactly the same as the top 20 from two or three years ago. They’ve spent those years building up a massive audience, and no new game is going to launch and then immediately jump into that space.

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Developers can kill themselves with massive user-acquisition spending, but Weidemann thinks that’s a terrible idea.
“We cause the problem of user acquisition ourselves. The problem is that the top companies are overspending,” he said.
A publisher like King spends three times the lifetime value of a user to acquire them because they are bringing three people — friends and family members — with them. That means they are driving up the cost for everyone.
The alternative to competing in the insane player-acquisition market is to turn to something like word-of-mouth. He suggested working with YouTube or social-media influencers. The costs for that are going up, but it’s not as prohibitively expensive and it’s even occasionally possible to get YouTubers to promote a game without paying them at all.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/16/the-new-rules-for-navigating-that-damn-app-store/