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13 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Why Hypercasual Can’t Sustain the Growth of Playables: Part Two

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Adam Stevens, Chief Product Officer at Luna Labs. You can read the original version of the second of this two-part series here. TL;DR Over the past two years, hypercasual studios found their way to make playable ads drive significant results. In doing so, they propelled this format to the main stage. However, the methods they found to be successful for this format cannot simply be “replicated” in other game genres — these studios must now find their own paths for success. And as playable ads evolve, studios need to also overcome some additional challenges, for the format to continue its growth and significance in the ecosystem. Creatives didn’t suddenly become important — for many years, the quality of the creatives you produce as well as your ability to analyse results and improve...
12 min read
#Game Design

Purple Jam Interview: Lessons from making an Audio-only Game

Ahead of the release of their newest title, Pitch Black, I spoke to the developers at Purple Jam to learn how they’ve gone about creating an audio-only game, and what they have learned along the way. Thanks for joining me today. Before we get started, would you be able to give us a bit of background on your team? Sure thing. So, Purple Jam consists of three audio specialists turned game developers. We first met each other last September when we were powering through our Masters’ at the University of Derby. But it wasn’t until we reassessed our lives did we decide to join forces and create the game of all games – Pitch Black: A Dusklight Story. In a flash of inspiration, Harry Cooper (commonly known as ‘The Mastermind’), had the idea of creating a binaural based audio game....
12 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Why Hypercasual Can’t Sustain the Growth of Playables: Part One

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Adam Stevens, Chief Product Officer at Luna Labs. You can read the original version here. In 2019, playable ads rose to the forefront of mobile advertising as a top-performing creative format.* Today, nearly every mobile gaming studio is looking to un-tap the creative potential they can bring. At Luna, I experience this in every conversation we have with our partners, and the results we see. Playable ads have become an integral part of any attempt to scale a game with a healthy margin. Finding shareable data on the extent to which playables have contributed to the success of today’s top games is difficult. Studios tend to keep such information close to their chest. However, I can say with certainty that when you find the right game and the right playable ad flow,...
9 min read
#Data & Analytics

Wildlife Studios: Why Your Studio Needs Data Scientists

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Vitor Margato, Senior Data Science Manager at Wildlife Studios. You can read the original version here. Data science has been a hot topic for the past few years, but it’s often hard to understand what data scientists actually do in real companies. They seem to be behind whatever is going on when your favorite streaming app recommends you new songs, or when a ride-hailing app assigns you a driver, but what exactly is their role? In this post, I don’t try to describe how data scientists can help companies in general — I’ll focus on mobile gaming companies, because that’s where I have firsthand experience. Hopefully, some concrete examples will help you form a clearer picture of data science. But first, let me just take a step back to explain why I think those companies absolutely deserve...
7 min read
#Strategies

Deconstructing the State of the Hyper-Casual Market in 2020

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Mobile Free to Play. You can find the original version of this post here. HyperCasual is quite a perplexing genre to many creators of mobile games. When you download a game about Ironing, Coloured Sand or WaterSlides you wouldn’t expect them to be the most popular games on the store, downloaded up to 20 million times in a month.  The simplicity of the titles and the scale of the audience are both shocking and inspiring. HyperCasual as a market has grown from strength to strength over the last 3 years and is only now hitting the top of it’s S curve. Simplicity is still the ultimate sophistication, when it comes to mobile hits. This article analyses the market and how it has grown and potentially where it will continue in 2020. If you...
17 min read
#Game Mechanics

14 Best Hyper-casual Gameplay Mechanics

As Voodoo has put it, the key to a successful hyper-casual game is making sure it’s short, simple and satisfying. When working towards this, there are a lot of different mechanics you can use and combine for your gameplay, so we thought we’d explore which ones do the best, and why. These mechanics are the building blocks of game design. The more you know, and the more you experiment with them, the more engaging your games will become. Please, use this list as a base for inspiration, but don’t be afraid to combine multiple mechanics. We’ve seen that many fusion games with a fresh twist often perform best. Do your research Researching similar games can help you find what works and what doesn’t (as well as discovering your own niche). We’ve launched GameIntel, a new and improved mobile intelligence offering...
6 min read
#Game Mechanics

Using Hybrid Genres to Broaden Your Mobile Game’s Audience

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published by Kalle Heikkinen, Chief Game Analyst – China. With over 400 games analyzed under his belt, Kalle has a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t in the mobile game market. Is blending multiple genres into a single package a success formula or a recipe for disaster? Are there ways to cater to a bigger audience across the casual-mid-core spectrum? GameRefinery has been following the market for so-called hybrid games closely, such as titles that are mixing elements from multiple different game genres to create a hybrid genre like Idle RPG. All data and examples in this post are gathered from the GameRefinery service, check it out here. If you’re interested in researching over 200 in-game features, their popularity, and implementations or checking out feature deconstructions of hundreds of games, you might...
9 min read
#Game Design

Five Mistakes to Avoid When Making A F2P Game

Back at PGC Helsinki 2019 in October, we had the pleasure of seeing quite a few interesting talks. But among all the sessions we attended, there was one that particularly stood out – where Priyank Badkul from Huuuge Games shared the five key mistakes mobile game developers should avoid after deciding to pursue their F2P game idea. Priyank is a Product Owner of Coffee Break Games at Huuuge Games – a division that focuses on Classic Games such as Chess, Checkers, Dominoes and many more. He has been making games for the last 14 years. He produced the first official Formula One mobile game and Bingo Bash – the all-time highest-grossing bingo game. If you weren’t there in Helsinki for the conference, here’s Priyank to bring you up to speed: I’ve worked on some very successful mobile games. But I’ve...
11 min read
#Live Ops

10 Rules to Consider When Preparing Your Mobile Game for Localization

Editor’s note: This article has been contributed by Alconost, a global provider of localization services for apps, games and other software into 70+ languages. Alconost also makes advertising and educational videos and images, teasers, explainers, and trailers for Google Play and the App Store. We’ve written this article as a tribute to numerous questions from our clients: What’s wrong with my game? Why isn’t localization enough? How can we fix it? Cutting corners when bootstrapping a new game is a widely-used strategy. And it might even be an efficient one, as long as you aren’t planning to grow incrementally. However, shortly after the long-awaited local release is in the bag, most game developers start thinking about how to attract more international gamers. And sooner or later, after taking a crack at promoting their game in more countries, they come up...
7 min read
#Data & Analytics

A Zeptolab Guide To Soft Launches

The purpose of this post is to share what I would say to myself if I was able to travel back in time to my first day as a product manager starting out in the industry. It reflects what I think is one of the most under-appreciated parts of the work: running effective soft launches. Too many games are ‘dying’ in soft launch. Too many teams don’t fully appreciate how markedly different a soft launch is from ‘regular’ live operations. This is something I personally wish I understood much better at the start of my career. It’s also something I find myself talking about a lot in my current role at Zeptolab Publishing, where I regularly meet with studios around the world.  So if I had a few minutes to prepare my ‘past’ self for the challenge of this industry?...
4 min read
#Data & Analytics

ARPPU in top performing games up 20% compared to 2016

Analysis from Benchmarks+ takes into account several different performance quantiles, including the “superstars” (top 5%, 10%, 15%), and the “standard” quantiles (top 25%, median, bottom 25%). We’ve segmented the analysis in this way to give a broad signal of typical performance bands seen across the industry. Tracking these quantiles also sheds light on historical trends per “band” to give a better sense of how the industry has evolved. Using Benchmarks+, we have analyzed how the main gaming categories and genres have performed for daily ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User), looking at the full year of 2019, and all the way back to 2016. For this analysis, our key focus is the top 5% performance for this metric, which is a good indication of how much “whales” spend in popular titles on any given day. All revenue is IAP based...
13 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Battle Passes: The Latest Hot Trend in Mobile Gaming

Editor’s Note: This is an extended version of an article on the same topic that we published int Pocketgamer.biz, and was originally written by Erno Kiiski, Chief Game Analysts at GameRefinery – US. In his job, he’s played and analyzed hundreds of titles on a feature level, giving him a strong sense of the current western mobile game market. So, without further ado, we’ll let him take the lead.  A bit over a year ago, GameRefinery wrote a post about Battle Pass systems. Back then, this monetization mechanic was still brand-new with Fortnite, the first mobile title to popularize it among players. Even though other genres slowly started adopting the Battle Pass as well, it was mostly left to Battle Royale games. Now the mobile gaming market looks quite different, and you could argue that Battle Pass is here to stay –...
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4 min read
#Data & Analytics

Most Featured Mobile Games Across the Globe in 2019

3,100 apps appeared on the main page of the App Store in 2019. And 1,465 of them (which is almost 50%) were gaming apps. To help mobile game developers get a better understanding of which gaming apps Apple’s editors gave preference to in 2019, the team at AppFollow has put together an analysis – with the help of their App Store Featured Tool. Let’s get to it. We have analyzed all 1,465 gaming apps which appeared on the App Store main page across the globe between January and December 2019. We have gone over the main App Store tabs, including: App of the Day, Game of the Day, Stories, and Collections.  Stats at a glance: 47% of all apps featured in the Today’s tab are games. Games’ share in the Today’s Collections is 39%, and 48% in Stories.  Action, Adventure,...