Many game studios have relied solely on a single strategy – typically advertising – to make their money. But as times change, we’ve seen a shift in the market. Hybrid monetization might not be new, but it’s now more than ever becoming an essential tactic for game studios. So what’s caused this trend? And how will it affect the industry throughout 2023?

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...

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...

Editor’s note: This article was written and published by Tenjin. You can find their original version here.  We have released our “Hyper-Casual Benchmark Report” for Q3 2022. In this report, you’ll gain exclusive insights on ad spend and CPI on a country and platform level. Additionally, we have partnered with GameAnalytics to bring you a Day 1 and Day 7 retention benchmark. Here is a full list of what you will find in the report: Top countries by ad spend and CPI Top ad networks by ad spend and CPI Day 1 and Day 7 retention for the top 2% of games by platform (by GameAnalytics) Here is a sneak peak from the report… Tenjin data from Q3 2022 shows that Brazil is the biggest outlier in the report with very low CPI (0.06 on Android, and 0.14 on iOS) relative to...

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 The success of playables in Asia In Japan and South Korea, where banners and video ads dominate, the emerging playable ads have significantly changed people’s perception of ads, thanks to the immersive, highly interactive ad experience they provide. At the same time, these playable ads are also helping the games break out and make a splash on the global market. According to UA data from Mintegral: Playable ads increase IPM by over 85% on average in Japan and Korea, and 40%...

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 What’s the deal with playables? Playable ads have quickly become one of the most popular ad formats among apps and brands due to their premium user experience, accessibility, and superior conversion performance. And while playable ads are effective, they are typically expensive and time-consuming to produce, posing a significant challenge to scalability. It’s for this reason we’ve launched the Playable Ad Editor on the Playturbo platform. The Playable Ad Editor now provides advertisers with a zero-coding, drag-and-drop online editor to easily...

If you read tech news, you’ve probably stumbled on the term Web3. And you might be wondering what it means and how it could affect gaming. So let’s explore Web3 and the surrounding opinions. What is Web3? It’s all about ownership. The web has been going through gradual changes, ever since it launched. Web1 was where people uploaded websites with static pages and information. You simply read Web1. The next step was Web2, where users create their own content. Web3 is a prediction that users will begin to own digital content and have control over how they use it. But it’s also about decentralizing that ownership: making sure it’s not tied to any particular platform. (You don’t just own a movie on one platform, you own the right to watch it anywhere, for example.) “I was lucky enough to be...

Editor’s note: This article was written and published by Tenjin. You can find their original version here.  Let’s explore how the hyper-casual market has changed compared to 2021 Q3 and go through the top 10 ad networks and countries for 2022. This time, we partnered with our friends from GameAnalytics to bring you day one and day seven retention benchmarks in this report edition. The complete information is available at the bottom of the post.  Hyper-casual ad spend by platform. In 2021 Q3, hyper-casual ad spend by the platform was a bit higher on Android (55%) than iOS (45%), marking a decrease of nearly eight percentage points in ad spend on iOS compared to 2020. In 2022 Q1, advertising spends on iOS  and Android now shows a 50% / 50% split, suggesting that advertisers are becoming more and more comfortable with mobile...

Editor’s note: This article was written by the clever minds at HyperBid.  Hello there. I’m Ahmet, the business director here at HyperBid. Aside from the obvious ups and downs last year, we also had some big changes in how the monetization industry works. From new models improving revenue for developers to changes on how we can collect data. So I thought it’d be useful to summarise the four big changes we’ll see in 2022. 1. The waterfall model will take a step back There are two models you can use when selling the advertising space in your game. Either you use waterfall, which methodically runs through a set list defined by you, until you get an ad bid above your defined floor price. Or you can use in-app header bidding, where you programmatically scan through every bid for the best...

A few weeks ago, we went over what backends are, what you can do with them, and what kinds of monetization strategies are possible when using a backend-as-a-service. This time, we want to take this topic a step further. Now, we’ll chat about everything else your backend can do, and how to get your monetization right. Let’s dive back in. Quick recap from our last blog You can check it out if you missed our last article (or just want to brush up on your reading). But here’s the TL;DR breakdown: Your backend can handle all kinds of monetization types, including: Hard and soft currencies. Cosmetics. Loot boxes. Upgrades. Season passes and battle passes. Subscriptions. Opt-in events. DLC. And your backend matters here. They provide the ecosystem that lets your monetization both function and thrive. We’ve gone into a lot...

Monetizing your games in the most suitable way possible can bring a game studio many gains. It lets you grow your business, build out IP into a series, elevate your team’s potential, and keep you making more games. Today’s studios are somewhat spoiled for choice when it comes to how they make money. Whether you’re using in-app purchases, subscriptions, DLC or something else entirely, there are many options. Picking the right one for your game and audience is key here. What you might not expect, however, is how important your backend is to your monetization strategy. Here at LootLocker, building backends that empower developers is at the core of our business. That’s given us a wealth of understanding around the relationship between backends and monetization — some lessons we can’t wait to fill you in on. We have a lot...

For everyone creating Hypercasual games, prototyping and testing is a crucial part of the process. It allows developers to save time, to avoid over-investing, and to be able to iterate accordingly. In addition to testing the gameplay and mechanics, an important part of the process is to evaluate a game’s marketability. And that’s where creatives come in handy. Creatives are the ads used in a user acquisition strategy to drive installs and, as the first touchpoint with most of the players, they can have a huge impact on the success of a game. In short, the goal of a creative is to give a good idea of a game and to make players want to play it. Testing with creatives is the best way to rapidly assess the potential of a new product no matter the type of game. But...