Mobile game industry was reborn when smartphones got introduced to the market around 2009 in Korea. Due to the digitally-oriented nature, mobile game developers tend to spend more marketing budget on internet-oriented marketing levers than other industries.
Opensurvey recently published its gaming report with online 500 samples. The fieldwork was done in November of 2019. Among the list of most influencing information channel, the top one is ‘Play Store & App Store’ which is very predictable and doubtable ROI. However, the second one is ‘Friend’s Recommendation’. It could be an ambiguous and hidden lever to the markets. It leads to another question like ‘who are the friends?’ and ‘where do they get the initial information about the games?’.
Those two questions are very important because the questions will help to define where the big chunk of the marketing budget should go. To reach friends of a gamer, the marketing budget must divide into various levers with a minimum granular level of spending.