Assessing the Impact of Mobile Game Characteristics on their Commercial Success

There are no clear criteria for success on the mobile games market, which creates difficulties for developers at the beginning of their work. This paper aims to identify the most significant factors for the commercial success of mobile games. In order to select research methodology, the literature on the topic was reviewed. In the practical part of the work game characteristics were collected from Google Play pages using a search robot. After processing and clearing the data, 3170 mobile games remained in the sample. This allowed us to obtain representative results even in the context of 17 genres. Data analysis was carried out, correlations, multiple, logarithmic and semi-logarithmic regressions were constructed, ANOVA was performed. The regression lines for every genre were analyzed to identify the genre features and exceptions to the found patterns. The classification tree built in the work is able to predict the commercial success of a game with a probability of 82%. This can help the team starting a game project to determine the target combination of game characteristics. The characteristics, which increase revenue are: application size in MB, free download, age rating, required android version, localization level, belonging to the “Casino” and “Strategy” genres, the presence of video on the market page, descriptions of updates, in-app purchases and flag "Publisher choise". The following characteristics are negatively related to the revenue of applications: the time since the last update, the price of the application, the presence of advertising and belonging to the genres of "Role-playing" and "Music". Some of the characteristics studied have the opposite effect on the commercial success of games of certain genres. Games of some genres demonstrate a stronger or weaker relationship between a certain characteristic and revenue. Information on such exceptions is given in the final chapter of the work.