Editors note: Originally published on February 2, 2021, by Om Tandon. You can find the original article here. There is a new Match 3 on the block and it’s taking on casual games genre with both guns blazing! You (the reader) shouldn’t act surprised, though. The previous 3 articles in this series have been consistently forecasting that any new chart busting contender in Match 3 space was highly likely to be led by fashion & make up metas which was built on what we identified as the four “Must have” key design pillars of modern day meta Match 3 games. Magic Tavern/AppLovin’s latest fashion meta based “Project Makeover” does exactly that and even more! It goes beyond the framework of Classic and Meta Match 3 subdivided by being the first in its class of Meta Heavy Match 3 aka a MHM3 Game. But more...

Editor’s note: This article was written by Sarah D. Vries, Content Creator at Coda Games. You can find the original piece here.  When it comes to developing a hit hyper-casual game, your chances for success are not entirely based on luck. Any successful hyper-casual developer can tell you that it’s a lot of hard work, trial, and error and identifying best practices that help optimize and streamline their development process. At Coda, we’ve had the pleasure of working closely with many talented developers, even having had the chance to interview those that have created hit games. From observation and conversations, we’ve come to realize that many often share the same habits and best practices that help them to increase their chances of success. Keep reading as we identify four key habits successful hyper-casual developers share and how you can employ...

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by Théophile Tabary, Publishing Manager at Voodoo. You can read the original here.  As Publishing Managers at Voodoo, we often receive questions on current and future trends in hyper-casual. Trends can be difficult to navigate for studios and developers; sometimes you want to be following trends, and sometimes you want to be creating new ones. We’re here to give you some guidance on how to approach trends when creating hyper-casual games, and how to stay ahead of the game in 2021. What are trends in the hyper-casual market? The first thing to remember is that there are several different types of trends in hyper-casual. Each type contributes to the market in a slightly different way, and it is helpful to define which category your ideas or prototype fit into in the ideation and...

I spoke with Jeff Zirlin, Growth Lead at Sky Mavis (the developers behind Axie Infinity), to learn how they became the leaders in Blockchain, and their predictions for this new sub-genre of gaming. 1. Hey Jeff, thanks for chatting with us today. So tell me a little bit about Axie Infinity and your game Sure, would love to. Axie Infinity is a virtual world full of fierce, adorable pets called Axies. These pets can be battled, collected, and even used to earn cryptocurrencies with real value. On the surface, Axie might seem similar to Pokemon, Tamagotchi, or even animal crossing. And you’re not wrong to think that. But the big difference is that the markets for in-game resources are open and controlled by players. We reckon games with real, player-owned economies will become our digital homes; places where a new...

The other day, I had to venture into the tangled mess of my cable bag. No matter how organized I think I’m being – neatly wrapping cords around their plugs and keeping everything separate – whenever I leave the bag alone for five minutes, it all turns into a Gordian knot by the time I return. It’s infuriating. I really should get a nice box, and make it easy to find what I need. It struck me how similar that feeling is to juggling data from a bunch of different games. Lots of tools and data, all in a mess. But thankfully, you can get a data warehouse to fix the problem. Data warehouses make it much easier to search through and find what you need, reveal insights, and help you combine all those different sources. They’re an essential part...

You might think that the most important part of being a game developer is, well, developing games. But you also need to be a writer. I’m not just talking about the words that appear in your game (although obviously those are really important) – you’ll also need to create copy for the app store description, patch updates, user interfaces… the list goes on. And the best publishers also have writing that supports their game. So that’s things like website content, press releases, and promotional material, for example, blogs and newsletters. The short version is that your writing is one of the best selling tools you have in your arsenal – eye-catching, well-written copy could be the difference between people downloading your game, or ignoring it and moving onto the next one. Don’t panic Before you run away shouting ‘But I’m...

If you had a chance to read part 1 of our licensed IP series, you should be pretty familiar with the basics when it comes to licensed IPs (if you’re not, we recommend navigating back to part 1 before reading on). With the fundamentals of IP law out of the way, we can start reaching out to IP holders. It’s actually pretty straightforward, though you should probably make sure you’ve got a lawyer to check over any contracts. So, what do you need to do first? Find the right fit Before you rush off and start hitting up every huge franchise for a chance to use their IP, you’ll want to make sure you’re the right fit. There are three questions to ask yourself: Do my mechanics work with this IP? If you’re making a racing game, will it really...

There are a lot of reasons to use a licensed IP. You could have made a game and now want to reskin and update it to reach a new audience, like Reigns: Game of Thrones or the new Angry Birds: Star Wars. You might be making a music game and need the rights to use a few songs, like Guitar Hero. Or perhaps you just want to include a single character in your brawler, like Super Smash Bros. Whenever you’re using another creator’s content, you’ll need permission. A license. But what are the pros and cons of doing that? Does it really help? The short answer is: maybe. But it’s a lot of work. We can’t get into all the nitty-gritty here, but we can cover the basics and give you a few tips to make sure you don’t fall...

Have you ever launched a new feature that you were confident would succeed and be game-changing? Not only did your gut tell you it was a good idea, but you were able to back it up with user research? Then, when you finally launched, you found the new feature made very little difference. Perhaps users didn’t notice it, or they just didn’t care about it in actual game play. All the time, money, and resources you put into it could have been spent elsewhere. This has happened to me countless times, and it’s why we at Solitaired now take a data-driven approach towards understanding what new features we should work on. A $1M mistake I learned the hard way that both my instinct and consumer research could be wrong. Before getting into the gaming space, I had run an educational...

The ecosystem of mobile ads in gaming has evolved to a point where it’s possible to understand what actions players took, and from this, learn how to generate the most Lifetime Value (LTV). Yet most tools out there are fairly new and, like many studios, you may be missing out by simply not integrating these into your typical work processes. To help give you a head start into what’s changed and why it’s important, we put together this guide on the most common blind spots for player LTV, and how to identify and address them to grow your game’s revenue and profitability. Let’s get started. Use the LTV metric to know which platform is performing the best The same game can perform very differently on Android compared to iOS. Even more so when you look across regions. In China, the...

Battle passes have been around for a while now, but only recently so in mobile games. With the rise of battle royale games like Fortnite and PUBG, this new strategy is now proving to be a reliable source of revenue for mobile game developers alike. So, what makes a good battle pass? And should you add this to your monetization strategy? To answer this, I look at the best of the best, and see how top developers use this tactic in their games. But first, what are battle passes? Let’s first talk about what battle passes are. To put it simply, players purchase a plan, and usually get extra rewards, items, skins, and more (which aren’t normally available in the free version of the game, or even on the item store). These passes usually last a limited amount of time...

“One does not simply hit the top of the app stores” – Boromir, Lord of ASO. Seriously though. Getting your game noticed on the app stores is no easy feat. Just like websites have SEO (search engine optimization), app stores have ASO (app store optimization). So I thought it best to ask some of the industry experts. I took the time to talk to a bunch of different developers, some with games on the Google Play store, others with games on the Apple store. And some with games on both. Simply to see how they set up their game’s pages, what they felt was most important, and to discover their top tips when it comes to the Mobile Store Page. I’ve compiled them into a bunch of takeaways, but I’ve kept all of the quotes in so you can see...