There is no robust formula that will guarantee financial success.
I'm sorry to say it, but if you're in this to make money you're really in the wrong business. If you make a great game and marketing goes well, you might get lucky and make some money from it, but the overwhelming majority of games struggle to even break even let alone make a large profit.
Concentrate on making a great game that you would love to play yourself.
There *IS* a robust formula that will almost guarantee success, but it is far from simple, requires several years of experience to master, and even then, may be obscure to apply.
Some people's job is to simply track metrics and adjust pricing strategies and economies to maximize revenue (I've even been doing that for a while). It is a very complex job, and may be impossible without the appropriate metrics.
My advice:
- Find someone very skilled to come up with a good day 1 strategy (pre-launch).
- Find someone very skilled to implement the right metrics into your game.
- Find someone very skilled to keep track of post-launch sales and steer the model towards profitabily.
Depending on the type of game/market, I may be able to assist further.