I think, like most fad-driven industries, trying to start a game development business as a financial investment is a phenomenally poor idea.

If you want to make money there are far better investments out there.

If you want to run a business there are far less risky options.

If you want to make games, then the other two things should be more like obstacles and annoyances, not goals. Then you hire someone to take care of those aspects, and focus on making games.

What Apoch is getting at is you either get into the game biz to make games first and everything else second, or you choose to go business first and everything else second - in which case, the game biz isn't among the prime candidates for making money.

@OP: Of course making games for smart phones isn't the best way to make money - how could it be? The financial returns are usually poor, if existent, and the market is driven by flukes and a rapidly changing demographic; knowing what will sell one month will not help you the next. That's not a terribly great way to build your business. Of course, as in anything, there are ways to guide your way in these sorts of things but nothing will help you to make completely accurate predictions all the time so it's a virtual certainty that sooner or later you will lose money on one or more of your games.

In fact, I'd wager a fair amount that your first half-dozen titles will barely break even or be financed at a loss. So, the primary reason for doing it shouldn't be because it's financially sound - it isn't.

By the time you accumulate the capital, staff, legal status, and other prerequisites of running a game-production business, the mobile games bubble is likely to have shifted to some other market. You're talking about starting a many-year venture around a fad which is, due to the rapidly-changing nature of technology, probably going to be superseded by some other major fad in the space of a few years. Certainly the monetization of mobile games is currently so fluid and ill-defined that you would need a superb business plan to attract decent investment and employees; nobody will gamble on a business plan that amounts to "make game, get money."

If you have a more solid proposal, cool; I don't mean to imply that you're just shopping for a get-rich-quick scheme here, although to be frank it does kind of sound that way. But all we can go on is what you've posted, and from what you've said, it doesn't sound like you're sitting on a brilliant marketing strategy for capitalizing on the soon-to-be dwindling mobile space.

Keep in mind that 2 years ago, web games were the rage. If you weren't writing web games, especially for Facebook, you just didn't get it. And now people are fleeing the burning ship of web games by the thousands, largely moving on to mobile.


Anything you want to do as a money-making venture needs to be resilient in the face of this kind of dynamic climate. There are two basic ways to get rich in a rapidly-moving industry: play ultra-short term, or play ultra-long term.

The latter is more obvious: you design a plan that will continue to make you profitable for many years, despite the shifts in the market. Then instead of hoping for a mid-term lucky strike, you sit it out and recoup your investment in, say, ten years.

The former is much more difficult and non-obvious: you start with a massive amount of money, build a team extremely quickly (think weeks), produce a couple of hits, and then withdraw and start your next business in some other space. By the time you realize that there's a profitable fad-based market around, it's almost too late; unless you are already a very good entrepreneur, you won't be able to get in on the fad in time. It'll dissolve out from under you and you'll be yet another dot-com bubble-bust statistic. The people who do get rich off of fads are the ones who see the trend coming before anyone else, and are usually the first 25% or so of people to try and capitalize on the market. The next 25% will probably do OK, the stellar examples of the next 25% will be alright, and everyone else will fail.


If you want to run a games business, great; just don't expect to succeed with a fast-money scheme unless you're already extremely good with businesses. (If you're here soliciting advice, you're almost certainly not enough of an established entrepreneur to pull this off.) Either go long-term or find some other way to generate your income.