“How much will my game cost?” is the first question almost every client asks us — and the honest answer, “it depends”, is useless on its own. So this post puts real numbers on it: typical budget ranges for different kinds of mobile games, what actually moves the price up or down, and the costs that rarely show up in a quote.
The figures below are ranges for outsourced development in 2026, based on our own quotes and what we see across the industry. They are a starting point for planning, not a price list.
Mobile game development cost at a glance
| Type of game | Examples | Typical budget | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Playable prototype | One mechanic, grey-box art | $3k – $10k | 2 – 4 weeks |
| Hyper-casual | One-tap runners, stackers | $10k – $40k | 1 – 3 months |
| Casual | Puzzle, merge, idle, light match-3 | $40k – $150k | 3 – 8 months |
| Mid-core | Strategy, RPG, PvP, co-op | $150k – $500k+ | 9 – 18 months |
| Premium / large-scale | Open world, live-service shooters | $1M+ | 2+ years |
If that spread feels huge, it is — a “puzzle game” can be 40 hand-made levels or a live-service product with events, a store and a battle pass. The rest of this post is about where your idea lands inside those ranges.
What actually drives the price
1. Scope: levels, features and content
Cost scales with how much stuff the game contains far more than with how “big” the idea sounds. Every level has to be designed, built, tested and balanced. Every feature — a shop, daily rewards, a leaderboard, a tutorial — adds code, UI, art and QA. Cutting a feature list from twenty items to eight is the single most effective way to cut a budget.
2. Art style
Art is often 30–50% of a mobile game budget. A clean flat 2D style or a low-poly 3D look can be produced quickly and consistently; hand-painted characters, full 3D animation, or cinematic cut-scenes multiply the cost. Pick a style your budget can sustain for every screen — an inconsistent game looks cheaper than a simple one.
3. Online features
Single-player, offline games are the cheapest to build and run. The moment you add accounts, cloud saves, leaderboards, real-time multiplayer or server-side economy, you add backend development, hosting costs, anti-cheat work and a much bigger test matrix. Real-time multiplayer alone can double a mid-core budget.
4. Monetisation
Ads and a simple “remove ads” purchase are quick to integrate. A full in-app economy — soft and hard currencies, offers, a store, a season pass — needs design, balancing, analytics and ongoing tuning. It pays for itself only if the game has the retention to support it.
5. Who builds it (and where)
Hourly rates vary widely by region. As a rough guide, experienced game developers bill around $80–$150/hour in North America and Western Europe, $40–$70 in Eastern Europe, and $20–$45 in South and Southeast Asia, which is where we work from as a game studio in Islamabad, Pakistan. We break those local numbers down in game development cost in Pakistan. A cheaper rate only saves money if the team is experienced enough not to rebuild things twice — check their shipped games, not their slide deck.
A typical budget, broken down
For a casual game in the middle of the range, the money usually splits something like this:
- Pre-production & design — 10–15%. Game design document, core loop, economy draft, prototype.
- Programming — 30–40%. Gameplay, UI, SDKs (ads, analytics, IAP), tools, platform builds.
- Art & animation — 25–35%. Characters, environments, VFX, UI art, store assets.
- Audio — 3–5%. Music and sound effects (licensed or custom).
- QA & device testing — 10–15%. Low-end Android devices are where games break.
- Project management — 5–10%. Planning, builds, communication.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
Development is only part of the bill. Plan for these too:
- Store accounts. Apple’s Developer Program is $99 per year; Google Play charges a one-time $25 registration fee.
- Platform commission. Apple and Google take a cut of in-app purchase revenue (15–30% depending on the program you qualify for).
- Marketing and user acquisition. For most commercial mobile games this rivals — or exceeds — the development budget. A great game nobody installs earns nothing.
- Backend services. Analytics, crash reporting, remote config and servers often start free but grow with your player count.
- LiveOps. Successful mobile games are services: bug fixes, OS updates, new content and events. Budget roughly 15–20% of the original development cost per year just to keep a game healthy.
How to spend less without shipping less
- Prototype first. A two-to-four-week prototype tells you whether the core mechanic is fun before you pay for art. We wrote about exactly how we do it in Grey boxes first: how we prototype.
- Cut features, not quality. Launch with the core loop and one retention feature. Add the rest when real players ask for it.
- Choose an art style you can scale. Stylised beats realistic on budget, performance and consistency.
- Use one codebase. An engine like Unity ships Android and iOS from the same project, so you are not paying for two native apps.
- Buy, don’t build, the boring parts. Proven SDKs for ads, analytics and backend save weeks of custom work.
- Test on cheap phones early. Fixing performance at the end is expensive. (Our Unity mobile optimisation checklist covers what to watch.)
How we price projects at Leekon
We keep pricing boring on purpose. A playable prototype is a fixed price — you know the number before we write a line of code. Full productions start with a one-week discovery and are then quoted per milestone, so every payment is tied to a build you can actually play. And if you already have a team, we can join it as a co-development crew on a monthly basis.
The cheapest game is the one you don’t have to rebuild. Spend a little to find the fun, then spend the rest making it great.
Have an idea and want a real number? Tell us about your game — we reply within two working days with a realistic budget band.
