Making Hit Casual Games Event – Voodoo, Platonic Games & GameAnalytics

If you’ve been following our blog, email, or social channels recently, then you may have heard the words ‘Arcade (R)Evolution’ or ‘Making Hit Casual Games’ been muttered about once or twice. But what exactly is this? And what does this mean for you?

In short, we’re hosting a series of GameAnalytics events (alongside numerous partner speakers from leading studios/publishers) around casual mobile games (called the Arcade (R)Evolution), and we’ve just held the first one of this series last week. If you were able to join us, brilliant! And thanks so much for coming. If you were sadly busy, then no worries, next time. But whether you want to catch up on missed content, or are eager to relive the evening, we’ve recorded each talk and shared the slides from this event below.

Before you dig in, here is some more info about our first event, and what you need to know about our next one…

Event 1: Making hit casual games (with a focus on hyper-casual)

What was it about?

The first event in our series was all-around ‘hyper-casual games’. Alongside our CEO, we were joined by Publishing giants, Voodoo, and Kawaii specialists, Platonic Games, to bring you the latest trends, stats, insights, and tips that you should know when creating hit hyper-casual games.

During the event, each speaker had a chance to present their session (topics below), as well as answer burning questions from the audience (there was a big audience). And yes, there were free drinks, pizza, and games – we even got Mario Kart on the big screen.

So when’s the next one?

As mentioned, we’re doing a series of these, likely around once every 3 months. We’ll be sharing updates for the next one (which focuses on Idle games) on our social and email, but make sure to follow us on meetup, to avoid missing out.

Now that’s out of the way, here are the talks, videos, and slides, as promised.

Talk 1: The Latest Trends in Hyper-Casual Games

Ioana Hreninciuc, CEO at GameAnalytics 

Using data from our portfolio of 74,000+ mobile games, our CEO, Ioana Hreninciuc, kicked off the evening with an industry update, sharing the freshest insights and KPIs for the hyper-casual category, as well as news about our upcoming features. Here is a copy of the slides to see the stats up close:

TL;DW – Stats at a glance:

• Casual games are growing. GameAnalytics can see a YoY uplift of ~30% in median DAU for top performing games. Arcade (hyper-casual) by comparison is decreasing.
• Casual games also outperform Arcade, with session lengths twice as long.
• The best performing games in the Arcade genre are getting the most traffic, with DAU (Daily Active Users) of around 94,000.
• To compete in Arcade, you’ll need some money in your UA budgets. At the moment, games will need a fairly high amount of DAU to rank with the top performers in the App store.

We’re actually releasing some fresh new stats for H1 2019, so keep your eyes peeled for that. For the moment, you can read up on more hyper-casual insights in this nifty blog we’ve put together, here.

Talk 2: Hyper-casual in a Hypercompetitive Market

Alexander Shea – Publishing at Voodoo

Next in our lineup, we had Voodoo, where they shared their best tips and advice when launching hit mobile games. In this talk, our audience learned just what exactly is Voodoo’s development approach, what their publishing agreement is, what metrics they care about, and the journey of a viral hit (looking specifically at AquaPark). Here are the slides, in case you want to see in more detail:

Publish your game with Voodoo:

This is a brilliant talk if you want to get first-hand knowledge of how exactly leading experts go about publishing games. We’ve actually spoken to Voodoo quite recently about what it takes to make a hit hyper-casual game. See what their 3 rules are for making snackable games here.

Talk 3: How We Found A Hyper-Casual Niche

Valeria Castro – CEO at Platonic Games

Last (but not least), Valeria from Platonic Games took to the stage, and showed us just how exactly her small-time studio tackled the competitive market by finding their niche in Kawaii mobile games. Here is a copy of the slides:

TL;DW – Advice at a glance:

• You don’t need to compete against the big time studios. A few ways to find your place in the market is building a smaller community, taking bigger risks, and finding yourself a niche to appeal to.
• If you do go with a niche, you’ll need to find those gaps in the market. For Platonic Games, it was cute arcade games (with a kawaii twist).
• And if you want to build a community, you’ll need to understand your target. For this studio, they found that their audience like to write in ‘capitals’ and use emojis. Knowing this helped them talk to their players on a more personal level.

If you have any questions about these talks, or would like to get in touch to learn more about these events, feel free to email us here. Our next event will be about Idle games, which we’re hoping to host again in London around September.

Psst… If you couldn’t make it this time, here are some snaps we took during the evening: