Insights and tips about the games industry

Editor’s note: This article was written and published by Tenjin. You can find their original version here.  New year, new insights into the most innovative segment of the mobile gaming market: hyper-casual games! The much awaited “Hyper-Casual Benchmark Report” for Q4 2022 is here to provide you with up-to-date data on key performance indicators, user behavior, and trends in the hyper-casual gaming industry. This benchmark report consists of anonymized data collected by Tenjin and GameAnalytics for hyper-casual games in the date range of 01.10.2022 – 31.12.2022. So let’s dive in and explore what this report has to offer! Here’s a summary of the topics we cover: Ad Spend % by platform Median CPI by platform Top 10 countries & ad networks by ad spend on Android and iOS Median CPI for the top 10 countries & ad networks by ad spend on...

GameAnalytics is proud to announce that it has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance in accordance with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) standards for Service Organizations also known as SSAE 18. Achieving this top security standard demonstrates that GameAnalytics pursues enterprise-level security for partners and customers’ data, safely processed within the GameAnalytics systems. GameAnalytics is also delighted to be officially certified for ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (ISO 27001)! This stands for an internationally recognized standard that ensures that our services and products meet the best practice for an information security management system. Using this collection of standards will help our organization manage the security of assets such as game insights, personal data, financial information, intellectual property, employee details and any information entrusted to us by third parties. We are committed to following the highest quality and consistent security management system,...

A central location to come home to After launching You Suck At Parking, Happy Volcano wanted a central home for their analytics data. David Prinsmel, Happy Volcano’s game director, and their data engineer, Rahul Jani, found that Player Warehouse let them be more flexible around storing and processing their data. They could pull it all into one central location and then create their own visualizations off the back of that information. Here’s what they found along their journey. Focus on your onboarding process first If you want players to stick around, you need to make sure they feel comfortable in your game. So your onboarding process is vital to your success. Through their data, Happy Volcano realized that people were far more likely to drop off if they didn’t play through some of the single-player races before hopping over to multiplayer....

Learn how successful publishers evaluate hundreds of games per month, to find the next hit game.

Building video games has never been a simple task. You can have a brilliant idea for a game, but without the right skills, tools and resources, it can be near-impossible to tackle by yourself. Especially if we consider something as complicated and new as virtual reality. Not that this stopped Sergio Hidalgo. Being a one-man studio, Sergio managed to produce, release, and publish two successful VR titles. His first title, Dreadhalls, sold up to 250,000 units worldwide, and hit over 60,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch. (For comparison, Team Fortress 2’s highest was around 80,000.) While Cosmodread has had approximately 25,000 players on Steam alone. So to get his advice and learn his secrets, we sat down to hear his story and journey as a solo-game developer. Here’s what he had to say. 1. You don’t have to have it all...

We recently spoke with Janzen Madsen, founder at Splitting Point Studios, to get his perspective on how to develop a hit on Roblox. Splitting Point has created multiple experiences, including Field Trip Z which this year alone saw more than 45M unique players. Janzen is intimately familiar with what makes a Roblox experience a success. Roblox is an absolutely massive platform, with over 32 million experiences and 52 million active users. But making a game there is unlike making a game anywhere else. It’s much faster paced, the audience is much younger, and it’s much more tricky to design. The typical principles you might expect are quite different. 1. Don’t make it like a mobile game “Often, developers coming from the mobile gaming industry will assume that they can replicate their success by rebuilding their games on Roblox. This just...

Obsessed with making games that people will remember for a lifetime, Halfbrick decided to convert their hit title, Fruit Ninja, into a VR game. It was a natural evolution – people apparently really enjoy slicing fruit and swinging swords. After that success, they created Fruit Ninja VR 2 – adding more features and exploration to the game. “Making a game for VR is very, very different,” said Liam Potter, one of the lead gameplay programmers on Fruit Ninja VR 2. “There are a lot of things you need to take into account that you just don’t for console or mobile.” With that in mind, let’s dive into those challenges and see what Liam advises. Show players the play space early In a VR experience, it’s incredibly difficult to make sure that players are looking where you want. Gamers notoriously fail...

Catching 80% of their bugs One of the main reasons that Splitting Point integrated GameAnalytics was because of our bug-tracking capabilities through our error reporting dashboard. This was particularly important to the studio as the Roblox platform is extremely fast-paced. They would be updating their game every week, and finish the changes two hours before the deadline. “We were pumping out updates every week on a Friday – and probably about 80% of the bugs we caught were because we were using GameAnalytics,” Janzen Maden, founder at Splitting Point, explained. Quite simply, there was no time for quality control. And it was also too complicated with such a small team. Soon, Splitting Point realized that they could find more than just bugs. They could check logical problems in the game design itself by using custom design events. “With Field Trip...

One of the reasons why hyper-casual games are so popular is due to how quick and easy they are to make. Simple controls, artwork, and game design make it easy for any developer to pick up. But hyper-casual isn’t the only way to go. There are other ways to build a game on a budget. One way is narrative. We’ve talked a lot about how to add new layers to your games by simply layering in a story. And we discussed how you need three Cs: character, conflict and change for your narrative. This time, we’ll look at the top games that use storytelling as a core mechanic and show you that you don’t need sparkling design and intense gameplay to create a hit. You just need an extra C: Choice. Because choice is how you can differentiate a book...

We learn by playing. When we enter the world, we’re full of curiosity, and play has always been at the centre of how we satisfy that curiosity. Sadly, it’s beaten out of us when we go to school, and taking tests suddenly becomes a chore. But it doesn’t have to be. It’s possible to learn while having fun. In fact, that’s exactly what some apps are doing. And it’s working. Games are the most popular genre on the app store. They’re masters in the art of keeping users engaged and happy. So how can we learn from them? What is gamification? You’ve probably heard the term ‘gamification’ before. But if you haven’t, it’s the act of taking gaming elements and mechanics and applying them to your non-gaming app. Often to ramp up retention and engagement. And it works. If we...

Editors note: This article was originally written and published by Mindworks, a leading self-service creatives platform from Mintegral. You can find their original version here. Mindworks is giving GameAnalytics users exclusive trial access to create countless playables and advertise them for free with Mintegral. Hurry, this amazing offer is for a limited time only. Activate your free Playturbo trial How powerful can a premium playable ad be when it comes to user acquisition? Quite powerful, actually. Here is an example: a single playable ad created by Mindworks generated the lion’s share of downloads for ITI Studio’s game ‘On Ice!’. ITI: top hyper-casual developer with high quality standards for its ad creatives ITI is a well-known hyper-casual mobile gaming developer in the Japan market. Its hit title Rescue Cut, released in 2019, was named one of the best games of the...

Building hyper-casual games is a great way to get into game development. With their short cycles and simple gameplay, crafting a hyper-casual title means you can learn important skills across game design and monetisation, which you’ll need for success in the mobile games industry. But how do you get started building a hyper-casual game? What exactly goes into creating a hit in this genre? What KPIs should you track and what results should you be aiming for? There’s a lot you should know before getting started. So before you get tapping away and developing your next hit, make sure to read through these resources to master everything ‘hyper’. 1. Understanding hyper-casual The hyper-casual genre is a unique one. It’s made up of short, satisfying, and simple gameplay, basic artwork, and relies heavily on ads to make money. So to kick...