Sample Mobile App Proposal
To: Darren H. “Akiri”, Administrator; Illustrator
From: Sydnee Brashears, Consumer
Date: 5/1/2016
Subject: Mobile Application
FlightRising, our dragon breeding sim, is developing rapidly even with our limited registration times. On average, there are over 2500 users on the server at any given time, according to our site’s activity log. Over a million dragons have been created, thousands of accounts have been registered, and we have kept on schedule in delivering at least one new feature every two weeks. Player generated accents and skins have skyrocketed the purchase of gems, our in-game currency, and both player and staff morale is high.
We have come a long way over our two years as a site in beta, and the next step is to reach out to our mobile users. Our mobile site is not stable enough to support the steadily growing mobile consumer, and with browser-based use becoming a thing of the past, a mobile app would help solidify our hold on today’s market and be a successful long-term investment.
Why should we make a mobile app?
There are several advantages to having a mobile app as well as a website. The advantages to us would be:
Increased Traffic
Increased Ad Revenue
Increased Player Morale
The first point is this: having a mobile app would increase our user traffic. People are buying smartphones at a 3:1 ratio in comparison to laptops, and use them over 10% more than standard laptops due to their range of functions and lower price tag. According to a recent study by Flurry, the average person spends ~3 hours on their phone, but only 22 minutes are spent in browsers. In the future, we will likely have our mobile users outnumbering our web users. The more players that utilize our website or app, the more likely they are to buy our gems. This leads to my second point.
The increased number of people on our servers will in turn increase our ad revenue, which is a main source of our profits.With this increase we will be able to spend more on other large projects we have planned: color wheel expansions, new genes, and the newest breed of dragon.
Finally, this will increase our player’s morale. As you and the community manager have seen, our players have gotten increasingly frustrated with the mobile site’s limitations. The minigames cannot be played, the coliseum is nigh unusable, and several other integral features are either too slow to function or glitch. It would make the players happy, and happy players stick around.
What should we consider before investing?
Despite all of these pros, there are some risks involved with making a mobile application.
Expense
Time
Delayed Projects
Creating an app that will run as well as the website will be expensive. Hiring an app manager, integrating the minigames and the coliseum, and uploading the application will cost a lot of money that we as a small company would need to discuss before spending. An amateur might cost $12+per hour, but most professional app developers will charge upwards of $100 per hour. In all, it could run us between $10K-$250K. This does not include integration to social media, nor does it include infrastructure and database, which together could run several thousand.
The time to create this mobile app, games included, would be on average between 420+ through 550+ hours of work to develop. We may have already coded the games themselves, but they will need to be modified in order to work on a mobile application.
This would delay some of our other projects that our players have been waiting for, like the Adventure Mode and the Coliseum Overhaul. This new addition to our roster, though, would ultimately be the most stable investment in keeping our audience for years to come.
In Conclusion
It will help Flight Rising to offer a mobile app alongside the browser due to rising usage of mobile phones, the greater opportunities for site growth, and overall customer satisfaction. Despite its steep cost, it will keep us relevant and a considerable force in the breeding sim competition.
