Mobile gaming has become a massive industry, reaching beyond $10 billion annually as of 2015. The industry covers all games from puzzles to adventure games and racing games, but a specific genre of the gaming world can be interesting and profitable with the right features. The roleplaying game (RPG) genre has reached into many other genres to create a potentially endless stream of gameplay and many different scores to measure. As you think about designing a mobile game app, consider a few ways that an RPG (or adding RPG elements) can prepare your game for long-term earnings.

What Is An RPG?

The term RPG has been argued by fans and game developers alike. It may evoke memories of games with dungeon exploration, dragons, swords and treasure, but its implementation has changed in recent years.

An RPG involves managing different statistics and traits of a character. For older RPGs, this meant increasing a character's strength for fighting with melee weapons, intelligence for using magic, agility for ranged weapons, and stealth abilities and other statistics (often called "stats" for short). Stats are basically a database of traits that operate inside your character to give different levels of performance.

The RPG genre once competed against sports games, action games and other games for attention. Although RPGs still have their own genre, many games seek to pull elements from different genres for a more in-depth experience.

A shooting game can take RPG elements by adding stats for stamina, which allows a player to run further without getting tired. A shooting game may have different stats for aim, which reduces the amount your character's hands move and shake with a gun. Adventure games could use a giant list of stats that can be as broad as unlocking a stat to use guns or swords, or as specific as being better at slashing than stabbing.

How Can RPG Elements Increase Profit?

Instead of planning a game to be beaten, plan the game to be a continuous process of game resolution. As a player continues in the game, they can branch out even further into their specialization or try to be a massive jack-of-all-trades by spreading their stat points evenly.

This may mean that your app needs to continuously evolve. As players near the maximum amount of stat points in the game, game app developers can work on new parts of the game (often called expansion packs) to offer new adventures and new abilities that come from stats.

Stats aren't just a part of the character. Different weapons, clothing and accessories can be a part of what makes a player's character powerful. Stepping away from power, if you have an art team with enough imagination to make different outfits, weapon types and accessories, you could sell these items as microtransactions in a real money shop attached to the game.

With microtransactions comes an easier time with online marketing. Instead of just having ads in different parts of your game, you could offer alternative currency for your game's cash shop if players interact with your sponsors.

Create a community forum where players can share the experience, compare their characters, and discuss the changes in your game to keep interest high and advertisement contact higher. If you want to begin planning an RPG that could be a continuous project for a constant stream of income, contact the best app developers with experience in mobile gaming app planning.