Developing and publishing a mobile game is pretty easy. Unfortunately, it can also be pretty expensive. For those who find mobile games development to be too costly, Facebook has a pretty tempting offer.
At the Casual Connect conference today, Facebook will be announcing a new program that will see the social network publishing mobile games in return for a cut of the revenue. It’s called Mobile Games Publishing and Facebook says that it’s “a new pilot program to help small and medium-sized developers take their game global.”
Here’s what Facebook says it has to offer developers that sign up with its program:
Find the right people
With our unique targeting ability and mobile users who like playing a diversity of games, we’ll help the right people discover your game.
Grow to scale
Let us introduce your game to our more than 800M monthly mobile users. We’ll help you drive installs at scale with Facebook’s massive reach.
Build lasting success
We’ll also share analytics tools and the expertise we’ve gained from helping games grow on our platform for many years.
That seems like a pretty good value, but it’s hard to say at this point. Facebook isn’t revealing how much of a revenue cut it wants from games that it helps publish. If it’s too high, it wouldn’t make sense to share revenue with Facebook when the iOS App Store and Google Play already take 30 percent from the games sold on each platform.
We may not know the revenue cut, but some developers already do. Those same developers have apparently found it to be fair enough to sign up with the service. TechCrunch reports that 10 developers, including Rainbow, Kiwi, Space Ape, Gameloft and others, have already signed up for Facebook’s Mobile Game Publishing.
This latest announcement seemingly ties into Facebook’s experiment from earlier this month that saw the social network putting mobile game ads directly into a user’s notification tab on mobile devices. It already advertises mobile games via Mobile App Install Ads on a user’s mobile news feed, but going directly after the notifications tab may prove to be an excellent advertising avenue for developers that sign up with Facebook’s pilot publishing program.