Part of the publisher life is judging titles for potential success while retaining some sort of stability for the company. That can be a lot of educated guesswork but you need to forecast quickly in some way or another. For that, I have created my own biz plan that I'm happy to share with you: Click to download
Feel free to save your own copy to fiddle around with numbers - generally everything in green is the stuff you should adopt for your own business as these numbers were a forecast on a Chinese Mobile MMO that has been declined due to the numbers and risk potential: a 13% profit is just not feasible for putting $7 million at risk. As a side note: I created that sheet 3 years ago so could satisfy my curiosity, and am proud to say it came in close with $50k difference to the $8.5 million gross revenue in reality over those 3 years.
Understanding the sheet
What you need to understand primarily for this model is which marketing channels you can realistically toy with, and with how many installs you can calculate for every month. A modern-day marketer worth his salt will understand how to estimate the monthly organic download volume by beginner-level understanding of ASO and which ranks you can attain for which share of the search pie - I wrote about this in the ASO analytics section of my article 'Fixing Mobile Game Underperformers'.
Retention, CPI per marketing channel and the scaling expenses are practically self-explanatory, and your pricing model should come from your competition research or own experience - the ARPPU here is pretty high due to the base numbers having been a MMO, so you will need to adopt values here.
And lastly, change the localization and personnel costs - you will likely not have a monthly word count of 5k per language for translation into 10 target languages, and you will not have just 4 staff that operates as part of a bigger, unaccounted-for framework.
Understanding this base calculations is also helpful for developers themselves to see what expenses await on the publisher side - they are generally getting the 30 to 50% license fee of net revenue, so they will understand what their burn rate can be at what stage.
How to expand the sheet
For your business, you might want to detail the sheet more:
→ Break down earnings per marketing channel (useful for splitting low-quality featuring versus high-performing social media advertisement)
→ Break down your personnel planning more to get a better understanding of budgets
→ Expand your marketing channels (although your AppsFlyer integration should do that for you, and not a simple forecast sheet)
→ Try predicting browse traffic and split organics between Search and Browse