Study reveals the best countries to soft launch mobile games this year

Photo credit: FantaMagier.

A successful soft launch is the best way to optimize your game for widespread release. Generally, it allows game developers to save money and time by receiving customer feedback early.

But today, we are not going to talk about how you should start your soft launch campaign. We are going to find out where you should do it. The principal point in your decision on where to soft launch your app depends on the markets you’re going to shoot upon releasing worldwide.

It wasn’t surprising for many people in the mobile game market that Canada ranked as the number one soft launch country in 2016, given its play and monetization patterns that are vert similar to the US. But about 2017? Does Canada still work well for everyone?

To find out, we at Zenna chose 20 of the most popular countries for soft launch and conducted a study. We looked into three geos: EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), NALA (North America and Latin America), and APAC (Asia Pacific). And we have used some criteria to discover which country could be the best fit for a specific developer or publisher.

1. Cost of CPI for different genres and geos

EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa)

EMEA is a wide and fragmented region having more countries than the others. It is culturally and ethnically diverse and quite attractive for almost every developer. The UK and the Nordic countries are considered as top-tier markets in EMEA. But the big sharks of mobile games like Rovio and Kabam prefer to soft launch specifically in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. But it seems like these countries are quite expensive in terms of cost for install. Here’s what we discovered about the EMEA region.

We have attributed every genre we were considering to three conventional categories: casual (trivia, puzzle, and card and dice), midcore (adventure, racing, and sports), and hardcore (action, RPG, and strategy).

NALA (North America and Latin America)

North America is the second largest region in the world with estimated revenues of US$13.8 billion in 2017. The mobile segment is the biggest and a tasty part of video game cake. Here, we have Canada, which was mentioned above as a leader on the soft launch market. On the other hand, Latin America, which is the smallest region in terms of revenues (US$1.9 billion in 2017), remains one of the fastest-growing regions. And here, we should emphasize Brazil as a country, which has become more popular for testing new games.

2. Device penetration

3. ARPU and credit card penetration

4. Choosing the country for soft launch

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