Tobias Ferel spent eight years at a mid-tier mobile publisher before starting his own consultancy. He now advises small studios and companies entering mobile gaming for the first time. We asked him what businesses consistently get wrong at the publishing stage.
The store listing is treated like an afterthought
Most teams spend months on the game and about three days on the App Store or Google Play listing. That ratio is backwards if your goal is organic discovery. The first screenshot decides whether someone reads the description at all.
Tobias works with a designer specifically on the icon and first two screenshots before anything else is finalized. Not because the game is not good, but because the listing is the first product most people will ever see.
A platform game with a weak icon competes against casual titles with huge marketing budgets. The visual has to do a lot of work in under a second.
Soft launch is not optional
Releasing in one or two smaller markets before a global launch gives you real retention data. Tobias uses Canada and Australia frequently because English-speaking users there behave similarly to US audiences but do not skew your global ratings permanently if something goes wrong.
Day-7 retention below 15% is a sign to revisit early level design, not to push harder on paid installs.
Update frequency signals health to the algorithm
Both app stores factor update recurrence into ranking. A game that has not been updated in four months looks abandoned to the algorithm, even if it is perfectly stable. Tobias recommends building a six-month content or patch roadmap before launch, not after reviews start dropping.
That planning work is where many first-time business publishers underinvest, and it shows in their 90-day numbers.