In this article we will investigate how that market has grown and potentially where it will continue in 2020. If you want to read more about the Mechanics of HyperCasual or How Voodoo dominated the category in 2018.

HyperCasual is a business model, not a genre.

The greatest trick HyperCasual ever pulled was convincing the world it was a genre. It is in fact a business model. 

A hugely successful business model at that. I would define a HyperCasual game as: any game that relies on 95% of its revenue from ad monetization. Generating profits from any ad network, offer wall or affiliate scheme – anything not directly paid for by the gamer. HyperCasual games are truly free to play, you pay with your time and eyeballs when you watch an ad, but you’re never asked, forced or limited by gameplay by your inability to purchase a currency or speed up a timer.

The very best games blend the ad experience and mechanics together and create fast, simple games that appeal to the broadest audience of players. 

2015-2019 for HyperCasual Gaming

We worked with AppMagic who are an app store revenue and download estimator to assess the growth and proliferation of HyperCasual games.  They have been tracking the charts of 47 app stores around the world and manually analysing and classifying Top 100 games into genres. Over that time they have tagged 1300+ games and estimated their overall downloads worldwide. Although having precise numbers can only be achieved if you own the app yourself, estimations provide very reliable trend analysis and it will be these trends we look at.

The chart above shows the estimated monthly downloads for the biggest HyperCasual titles from 2015-2019. There are some games that fall into both Casual and HyperCasual as they may have been iterated on with deeper mechanics, but the trend is clear. Year on year there were more and more games that grew primarily via the ad-driven model.

The total quantity of hypercasual apps has been increasing at a fairly predictable rate and competition in the sector has grown. Overall the sector itself still supports 6 times as many titles as back in 2015, from 100million per month to 600 million downloads per month in 2019. The very best titles can rack up around 50 million installs in a single month, but most top titles do closer to 10 million. A large bundle of titles can see 1 million per month quite regularly. 

New Game Releases have peaked

The trend of new game releases that break into the Top 100 clearly articulates that rapid growth phase of 2018. However, we seem to have reached a peak. By the middle of 2019 almost 80 new releases featured in the Top 100 most downloaded around the world, but this is now in decline.  This points towards new games needing more development and more testing before scaling and becomes riskier for publishers. 

Competition is fierce in 2020

Although the market has grown steadily and big hits continue to maintain performance, the publishing model has become fierce. Where Voodoo once clearly dominated, they now share the space with 3 other key rivals: Lion Studios, Say Games and Crazy Labs, often trading top spot on certain weeks. The middle ground has also grown, with 42 publishers from around the world who each drove more than 10 million worldwide downloads in January 2020.

This shows overall sector health, but competition burns cash and this will be having significant effects on the bottom lines and sustainability of the model in general. Success is always in the eye of the beholder and although it’s become much tougher at the top there are more companies that have created sustainable, growing businesses in the HyperCasual sector.

2019 the year HyperCasual sustained

2018 was often talked about as the boom when HyperCasual appeared and dominated the charts, however, 2019 was the year that HyperCasual stuck. More games than ever were able to sustain and retain a top 10 position for at least 15 days in a month in the US. 

Although the number of titles that can sustain has flattened, it’s still a healthy 5-10 games in a single month that stick in the download charts. We can also be fairly sure that most of these games were new releases due to the lifecycle of a HyperCasual being very short. Across 2019 alone 87 new titles managed to break into and hold a place in the top 10 for half a month, a factor of 10x higher than any other genre. This gives confidence as creating new novel titles as a smaller dev studio or partnered with a publisher can be achieved. Rank and sustain of rank do come at a cost. The actual return on investment for these games is unknown, due to large marketing spends, but one would hope this was profitable for each game.

Expanding the view point to the TTop 100, we can see that 2019 continued to be a year of dominance for the HyperCasual space with almost 1 in 5 games in the charts attributing their business model to Ad View monetization. The sector continued to grow and hold apart from a large blip when Google removed many thousands of apps for breaking their terms of service, but publishers quickly fixed and resubmitted these games. 

Predictions for 2020

With all these upward trends why is it that HyperCasual falling out of favor? Many believe that the simplicity of these mechanics cannot sustain, that the need to grow LTV will lead to deeper meta-games and features. I don’t see that as the case. I feel that most of these predictions still see HyperCasual as a genre and not as a business model. To be successful in this field you must embrace that business model on a deeper level and understand what makes players interact with the ads and stick in your games:

#1 – The Top 100 charts will continue to contain 1 in 5 HyperCasual games each month

I don’t predict a drop in the number of titles in the Top 100, yet I also don’t believe there will be an increase. The interesting change will be whether the apps present in the top 100 will be new or will be older more established titles. Can companies create even longer sustain for their best games?

#2 – Niches and Mechanics will combine further

Predicting what will be the next hit will become even harder. Right now, one of the most popular games on the store is Woodturning by Voodoo which as both genre and idea is novel, unpredictable and niche. 2020 will see even more “is that even a game?” approaches. 

A broadening of mechanics to include more progression, goals, idle and social elements will combine with the HyperCasual business model. Any developer who is not focussing on ad views and simplicity will have expensive marketing and won’t be able to grow. Some games will do this very well, others will fail miserably. The costs in time and development skills will rise.

#3 – Ad Monetization must get smarter and more native

The biggest issue in the genre isn’t the games, it’s the ad units. Quite simply they suck, they don’t allow for smoothness, beautiful transitions, different sizes, timings or formats to fit into the game experience. Ad networks will get smarter but they need to work with game developers to build ad tech to support the genre. HyperCasual ads will feel more and more native. Playable ads do so well because they encourage the user to enjoy the time away from the main game. Any ad network that thinks about the player interactions and experience, specifically in terms of how HyperCasual ads are used, will create games that retain for longer while still seeing high clicks and conversions. 

The post Is the HyperCasual market still healthy and growing in 2020? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Hey, another podcast this week. I had the pleasure of joining Joseph Kim and Eric Kress on another edition of “TWIG” (This week in games”). This week we focused on Epic’s PC Store expansion with signing more exclusives (Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon) and acquiring some key studios (Psyonix). Also have a brief discussion on upcoming legislation and PSNow subscriptions.

If you want to have some fun with the podcast, refer to Georg Baumgarte’s bingo sheet while listening:

The post TWIG 33 – The Expanding Epic Store appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Big thanks to Miska, Joseph and Eric for having me on!

The post TWIG 28: Snapchat, Apex Legends, Idle Miner, and Anthem appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

Genres and taxonomies are important distinctions for game designers. What works in one genre may not work in another. The audience – their tastes, their expectations, their desires vary dramatically. Within the app landscape, we are generally confined to the genres defined by the stores themselves. However, most of the time, they are too generic or audience trends react quickly and the standard groupings are not large enough. GameRefinery have recategorised and evaluated mobile games into 40 more relevant sub-genres. MFTP worked with their data to see how sub-genre landscape changed throughout 2018 and as a developer which genres might be overlooked or undervalued?

Top Grossing Charts in 2018

The top grossing represents the genres with the best mechanics that make people part with their cash and spend via IAPs. With all free to play the action of conversion (spending money in game) is a rare event. The vast majority of people never spend and those that do spend, spend infrequently. Therefore, games that do well in the grossing chart have game mechanics that increase the likelihood of a conversion event or the frequency of multiple conversion events.

We took the GameRefinery data set of the top 500 Grossing apps in each quarter of 2018, the games were categorised into a fixed set of 40 sub-genres according to their game mechanics. For each sub-genre, we determined:

1. The number of games in each sub-genre
2. The rank of each game
3. The Min rank, Max (mode) rank, Average rank, Median rank, Standard Deviation for each sub-genre.

Games which have a high number of titles in the the chart, could be considered as strong monetizing genres. Their mechanics encourage higher spends.  Games with the highest rank, i.e Position 1-5, earn the most money on a per app basis. High, Min or Max ranks signify that apps within the sub-genre perform very well.  Using calculated metrics we assess each of the sub-genre ability at driving high revenues on the app store.

We found some clusters of sub-genres that have more effective game mechanics at making money on the app store.  

• Rising Stars – Genres which have the highest chart rankings, but not necessarily a large number of games.
• Reliable Giants – Genres that have a large number of titles that span the full chart rankings, top to bottom
• Smash Hits – 1 or 2 titles that hit the top 20 grossing but the average game performs poorly.
• Fun but Free – Genres that support a small number of low performing titles consistently.

The Best Top Grossing Genres in 2018

The number of games in the charts over each of the quarters is a clear measure of a sub-genres ability to monetize.  These are the 4 reliable giants (Slots, Match3, Turnbased RPG, 4X Strategy) in the top grossing charts and we have covered these in the monetization section of the bible.  Each of these sub-genres support a large number (40-60) of games across all 4Q of 2018 that stay within the top 500 grossing. The rest of the genres tend to support around 5-20 games on average with Word/Trivia and Puzzle supporting the most.

Each quarter there is some movement in the number of games within a category. Categories which grew the count of games from Q1 -> Q4 in 2018 are showing stronger performance to monetize. The large dark green circle represents Q4 and the smallest pale green represents Q1. A consistent rise through 2018 would have the largest green circle at the top and the small green circle at the bottom, showing a rise in the number of chart positions being held. Slots, Battle Royale and MMORPG have all shown stead rise through 2018, whereas 4X Strategy, Tycoon/Crafting and Card Battlers have slowly dropped through 2018.  The best rising star categories outside of the Reliable Giants have been Word, Casual Sports and Casual Racing. Each of these have shown that they can grow their category in 2018. Comparing between this and the download charts, you can see that monetization is broader and less condensed although safety lies within the rising giants, which is why we see so many clones and copies of these game mechanics.

The Skew of Top Grossing Genres

Wicks

The chart above shows the spread of the revenue data. I took the average data across the 4 quarters to represent all of 2018. All the games have been ranked according to their highest average position throughout the year, the bottom left quadrant are the top performing genres. A wick (the thin blue line) is the min and max position for titles throughout 2018. A Candle the short, fat rectangle is the median and mean chart positions within 2018.  The shorter the wicks the tighter the range for the whole subgenre, meaning more concentrate chart positions. Concentrated high chart positions are favoured because the higher the rank the greater the ability to drive monetization. However, the number of games per category vary wildly and a larger number of games naturally increases the length of the wicks.

AR games such as Jurassic World Alive, Puzzle RPG and Card Battlers all have a number of titles that sit very high in the charts with a tight overall range. These sub-genres represent the rising stars of the grossing charts as they have a small number of top performing titles. It could also mean that gamers in these genres are more fickle, and favour 1 or 2 top titles with unique mechanics rather than playing a range of titles that each feature similar mechanics, like the reliable giants.  A lot of these sub genres also represent new and emerging niches in 2018 and when you observe the data across the 4Q you can often see more game entering and climbing the charts quickly.

Candles

If a genre has a dark blue central candle then it means the genre skewed positively, it’s Mean was higher than its median. A positive skew means that of all the games in the sub-genre more of them were of a higher rank than the average, meaning more games towards the top of the charts.  If the candle is white then the genre skewed negatively meaning more of the titles lay towards the lower end of the charts. The wider the bar the bigger the skew.

Games with long blue candles and very low wicks tend to show genres which have a number of top ranking games pulling up some low rank games. Battle Royale, Synchronous Battler and Interactive Story genres all show some stellar titles in the category, but also likely have fast following low performing titles bringing the average down.

Games with long with candles and short overall wicks represent genres that sit in the middle of the ranks, with a larger number of mid ground titles. Card Battler, Bingo and Breeding all feature stable but not stellar performances throughout 2018.

Bubble Chart of Top Grossing Genres

Top ranking games make the most money and we know that the store itself. Another visual representation of the same data shows the count highlighted by the size of bubble. AR and Puzzle rank highest overall throughout 2018 but have a small number of titles. 4X and Slots have the largest number of consistently performing game in the Top Grossing for 2018.

Competition on the App Store

Competitiveness is a huge factor in deciding which genre to try to attack when building your next game. The more games in a sub-genre, the harder it is to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd. A small number of titles with a low average rank however, means that the mechanics of the sub-genre itself might not support good monetization and is also a risky undertaking. It is therefore prudent to try to create a game in a genre with a lower number of titles, that each maintain a high average rank. We favour games which are rank 1-10 disproportionately as they take a lot more money than the lower ranks and we also prefer genres which have a positive skew as that’s showing that more of their titles are sitting higher in the charts than lower. We then combine this together to form the Genre Score (This is not a perfect mathematical score, something we came up with) and these game genres. Anything over 0 is good.  

Match 3, even with it’s competitiveness still stands out as a clear favourite for consistently monetizing an audience and maintaining high chart positions. This has been known about for some time with King and Playrix building entire studios and brands, appealing mainly towards the match3 audience. With enough uniqueness and enough marketing power there is still always room for another match3, but be prepared for the competition on the marketing side. AR and Battle Royale are still the stand out winners in terms of new entrants on the grossing chart. They have managed to support a few titles that all perform quite well while achieving high ranks.  

Conclusion

2018 has seen some real flux in the smaller genres through 2018. Although the top 4 grossing genres remained strong, rather than further consolidation there have been 2 strong entrants in the form of AR and Battle Royale that have supplied new gameplay and new monetization routes. The overall number of viable genre options available to free to play designers has increased and new monetization methods, such as subscriptions or vanity based IAPs are providing large sustainable revenues. Match3, AR and Battle Royale we’re the top genres to pick in 2018. Stay on the look out for more pure RPG, Synchronous Battlers and Turn Based RPGs which might have new twists in 2019 for more adventurous studios. For more established studios the top 4 still consistently perform but the competition from niche studios is increasing and piling on the pressure.

The post The Top Grossing Mobile Game Genres of 2018 appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Genres and taxonomies are important distinctions for game designers. What works in one genre may not work in another. The audience – their tastes, expectations and desires vary dramatically. Within the app landscape, developers and analysts generally confine themselves to the genres defined by the stores themselves. Most of the time these are too generic or broad to capture how a free to play mobile game is designed. GameRefinery have recategorised and evaluated the top 500 mobile games around the world into 40 more relevant sub-genres. We dug into the data to see if there were any genres that receive less coverage but have clear potential for new hits in 2019.

This is a 2 part piece. You can read the second part on the top grossing game genres of 2018 as well.

Top Free Charts in 2018

The top download charts represents games on the app store with either the widest appeal, most virality and/or highest marketing spends. The Download ranks have much greater fluidity than the grossing ranks because games tend to jump in and out based on marketing spend and the charts fluctuate much more across each region. For this data set we took US data only.

Driving downloads is as much about being on trend and having effective cheap marketing as is its game mechanics. However, just as we will see in the grossing charts, there are some game mechanics that dominate the download chart. The rise of Ad Revenue becoming a sustainable business model without IAP has allowed games to simplify and reduce development time to jump into the chart for brief periods of time. This has made it harder for most other genres to maintain chart positions, but there are some that can still keep top positions regularly.

The data we used was GameRefinery data set of the top 500 Downloaded apps from the US app store in each quarter of 2018. The games were manually categorised into a fixed set of 40 sub-genres according to their game mechanics. For each sub-genre, we determined:

1. The number of games in each sub-genre
2. The rank of each game
3. The Min rank, Max (Mode) rank, Average rank, Median rank, Standard Deviation for each sub-genre.

Genres which have a high number of titles in the the chart, could be considered as widely appealing genres. Their mechanics and positioning encourage more downloads. Genres with the highest max rank, i.e Position 1-5, have the most downloads which leads to the best opportunities for  advertising revenue. High, Min and average ranks signify that many apps within the sub-genre lie within the top 250 apps in the chart meaning they perform better as a whole. Using calculated metrics we assess each of the sub-genre ability at driving high revenues on the app store.

We then found some clusters of sub-genres that have more effective game mechanics at making money on the app store.  

• Rising Stars – Genres which have the highest chart rankings, but not necessarily a large number of games.
• Reliable Giants – Genres that have a large number of titles that span the full chart rankings, top to bottom
• Smash Hits – 1 or 2 titles that hit the top 20 but the average game performs poorly.
• Fun but Free – Genres that support a small number of low performing titles, they don’t climb high in the top grossing.

The Top Downloaded Game Genres

Simply observing the number of games in the charts over each of the quarters shows that there are some clear sub-genres that consistently perform well.  2018 was dominated by HyperCasual with there regularly being 120+ games in the top downloaded charts in every quarter making it the only reliable giant for the download charts. Hyper Casual is confusing as a genre as it’s really a collection of a large number of  hypercasual game mechanics, bunched together by a business model (Rewarded Video Ad Views). However you define it, it’s clearly been the overall winner of 2018 in the download charts.

Moving from Q1 to Q4 Hypercasual slowly dropped the overall amount of titles, yet it is still 3x larger than the next most competitive genre, Other Puzzle. There are also a large number of genres that perform exceptionally badly in downloads, such as MOBA, Music and Card Battlers. This could be in part due to the inability for the developers to market them to a broad enough audience. Reducing your audience by creating games targeting older or younger, male or female or niche/specialist fan bases greatly reduces your ability to achieve and maintain high ranks in the download charts.   

The large dark green circle represents Q4 and the smallest pale green represents Q1. A consistent rise through 2018 would have the largest green circle at the top and the small green circle at the bottom. Customization, Word, Arcade are the most secure genres for broad appeal and grew steadily through 2018. Puzzle, Sport and hypercasual all trended down across the year, but the effect was quite marginal.  The fact that the charts we’re so dominated by a single defined category shows a clear consumer trend, but who knows how long that will last in 2019?

The Spread of games in each genre

Wicks

The chart above shows the spread of the download rank data. We took the average data across the 4 quarters to represent all of 2018. All the games have been ranked according to their highest average position throughout the year, the bottom left quadrant are the top performing genres. A wick (the thin blue line) is the average  min and max position for titles throughout 2018. A Candle (the short, fat rectangle) is the median and mean chart positions within 2018. The shorter the wicks the tighter the range for the whole subgenre, meaning more concentrate chart positions. Concentrated high chart positions are favoured because the higher the rank the greater the ability for a genre to get downloads. However, the number of games per category vary wildly and a larger number of games naturally increases the length of the wicks.

AR, Battle Royale and Synchronous battles games all have a small number of titles that sit very high in the charts with a tight overall range. These sub-genres represent the Rising Stars of the download charts as they have a small number of top performing titles. The genres are less cluttered but also are clear trendsetters in their game mechanics. Titles like Fortnite, Pokemon and Clash Royale maintain a constant presence in the DL charts.

These genres have more fickle gamers. They tend to favour 1 or 2 top titles with unique mechanics rather than playing a large range of titles that each feature similar mechanics, like Hypercasual gamers.  A lot of these sub genres also represent new and emerging niches in 2018 and when you observe the data across the 4Q you can often see more game entering and climbing the charts quickly. Depending on the background of your studio and the size of your budgets, attacking the rising star category requires more innovation and development investment but the competition is less and your game will stand out more. Larger studios tend to opt for safer bets so Puzzle, Word and Interactive Story have all maintained clear download chart positions.

Candles

If a genre has a dark blue central candle, the genre skewed positively, it’s mean was higher than its median. A positive skew means that of the games in the sub-genre more of them were of a higher than the average rank.  If the candle is white then the genre skewed negatively meaning more of the titles lay towards the lower end of the charts. The wider the bar the bigger the skew.

Games with long blue candles and very low wicks tend to show genres which have a low number of top ranking games pulling up some low rank games. Battle Royale, Synchronous Battler and Shoot em’ Up. The highest average rank is a good indication of trends, because more games can sit and stay high in the charts.  As Hypercasual is the category to beat in Downloads any genre that lies to the left of it I would consider it as trending as it’s beating Hypercasual over the year in terms of position.

Sandbox is one genre that’s got a large negative skew. There is really only one top performing game in this category (ROBLOX) and the rest is having a hard time maintaining rank.

Games with long with candles and short overall wicks represent genres that sit in the middle of the ranks, with a larger number of mid ground titles. Card Battler, Bingo and Breeding all feature stable but not stellar performances throughout 2018.

Bubble Chart to show number of games within a genre

The Bubble Chart representation doesn’t clearly show the size of the Hypercasual bubble, it should be around twice the size (I blame Google Sheets). The size of bubble represents the number of titles in the genre and the distribution of the mean vs median gives you a sense of what a good average game might perform. AR and Battle Royale highest average Mean and Median throughout 2018 but have a small number of titles, you would expect as the number of clones increases that these genres would move closer to the 200 rank. Sniper, Other Arcade and Word/Trivia games manage to outpace the hypercasual genre, but still the download charts are swamped with many more hypercasual successes that hit the top 10. Taking the ideas from hypercasual but applying it to some of the more obscure genres on the store is another way a studio could hit big in the download charts. The pace of development and release rate will only increase in 2019, so make sure you don’t put all your hope into a single title for the studio to see success.

Competition on the App Store

Competitiveness is a huge factor in deciding which genre to attack when building your next game. The more games in a sub-genre, the harder it is to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd. A small number of titles with a low average rank however, means that the mechanics of the sub-genre itself might not support good monetization and is also a risky undertaking. It is therefore prudent to try to create a game in a genre with a low number of titles and a high average rank, these games allow you to differentiate yourself and the mechanics support good monetization. Rank position is disproportionately important to revenue, so we heavily weight the top 10 ranks.  To represent this we created a Genre Score, where we weighted sub-genres for being competition free and still highly downloaded.  As we know Hypercasual is a highly competitive space and as we’re not measuring exactly which apps make up genre, then take these results with a pinch of salt. Compared with the Grossing Ranks, I have factored the max download as less important than the sheer quantity of entries in Downloads.

Even with the huge amounts of competition on the store, Hyper Casual truly dominated the charts and if you were in a position to build and promote these titles then there was a lot of downloads available to you. It’s hard to see hyper casual loose it’s crown but there may be a shift back towards deeper game mechanics in simple style formats as players demand more from their experiences but want the look and feel of hyper casual.  Battle Royale, Other Arcade and Word/Trivia games have all show that there are still a lot fewer competitors at the moment and that the genres are very desirable by the sheer number of downloads they drive. Combing that desire with new or interesting monetization is the way to make huge revenues on the store itself.

RPG, Card Battler and MOBA games rank poorly for different reasons. In some cases there are so few titles that there isn’t the demand for the titles and in others they have a large number of competitors but can’t achieve the top download ranks.  Interestingly as we will see next week, these genres can still make a lot of money and this is down to the game mechanics themselves, but from a popularity point of view they are poor and tough to rank in.

Conclusion

Download charts have been dominated by the hypercasual sub-genre in 2018. The genre has consistently maintained high chart positions while supporting a large number of titles every quarter. It prompts discussion that hypercasual as a sub-genre might need to be further split to understand which mechanics are performing best to aid further development.  For more niche genres, Battle Royale and AR have both had a small number of very high performing titles in 2018, these games are on trend and people want to play them. Although we’re not looking at actual download numbers for this analysis, Fortnite has been a consistent force in both ranking tables all year.

At the lower end of the download charts, Shooting, RPG and MOBA (all male targeted genres) have shown consistent low performance. It stands to reason that to really get top performing titles you need to clearly appeal to men and women to broaden the overall download rates and so no matter which genre you’re working within, keep that in mind.

The various Puzzle categories, of Match3, Action and Other have also all maintained large portfolios of games in the top 500 and can maintain consistent chart positions, making them safer bets than other genres.

Stay tuned for next week where we look at the Top Grossing charts.

The post The Top Free Mobile Game Genres of 2018 appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

This is a follow up to our Top 10 Game Mechanics for Hyper Casual Games article that you might also enjoy

Idle game mechanics are nothing new. Anthony Pecorella of Kongregate diving in deep into the trend back in GDC 2015, but moving into 2019 we’re seeing some advancements in the trend.

I remember playing Cookie Clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Tap Titans, and the mountains of clones of the simple idle game landed in 2014, but then the trend died out.  Yet something changed. Starting in 2016, we’ve actually seen a big resurgence of the mobile idle game genre:

Aggregate downloads and revenue growth for mobile idle game genre from Q3 2016 to Q2 2018
Source: Sensor Tower Estimates

Looking at  idle games from 2014 to 2018, we can see a growing trend for both downloads and revenue in this genre. This is not the case for most of the mature genres on mobile. Puzzle, Simulation, Casino, and Strategy all have stabilized or declined in downloads, and seen slow growth in revenue. These genres are locked up, but Idle remains a hotbed of innovation on the mobile market.

In the last years we’ve seen a lot of completely new styles of idle game mechanics hit the market and see success: Merge Town by Gram Games challenged the assumption that idle games were only for spreadsheet-savvy mathematicians, Trailer Park Boys by East Side Games shows a path where Idle games can actually host a compelling narrative, and Idle Miner by Kolibri (previously Fluffy Fairy) shows that idle games can create compelling traditional simulation-style game loops.

For this post, I’d like to showcase the variety of paths to success that an idle game can have. While this may be focusing solely on the past, the hope is that this can inspire you to create better idle game ideas for the future.

What is Idle? how does it work?

If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t understand what idle is, we’ve covered it a number of times: (we’re fans here at MFTP)

Related Read

Idle Games, Everything You Need to know!

Idle games have risen on mobile because it is a genre that is perfect for modern mobile free-to-play design. The mechanics of idle games create perfect mobile sessions and drive strong long-term retention.

Related Read

Why you should care about Idle Games

In Retention, Design

Adam Telfer

Idle games, sometimes called Clicker or Incremental games, are games which are all about management of income. Similar to simulation games, their main differentiator is the focus on revenue growth decisions. For some examples: Idle Games on Kongregate / Reddit’s Guide to Idle Games

The key to the genre: no matter what you choose, you will make progress. But optimizing your decision about what upgrades to purchase next is the core of the strategy and what drives long-term interest in the genre.  Because the core of the game is focused on long-term purchasing decisions, retention is built in. Because progress is always felt, it always feels rewarding to come back.

Let’s now dive into the variety of mechanics within the idle genre.

#1 Linear/Clicker Idle

The core of these games are usually insanely simple: tap as fast as you can to generate income. This starts off as fun, but gets pretty tiring and uninteresting quickly. So it quickly shifts into deciding over which upgrades to spend that cash on:

• Do you want to generate more money while you’re away?
• Do you want to generate more income from your own taps?
• Do you want to save up for the big purchase that will increase your income tenfold?
• Or continue to purchase cheap upgrades for small income gains?

This decision-making structure has stuck with idle, but the core gameplay of tapping as fast as you can has not.

Over time, developers tried changes to the core gameplay to make it last a bit longer: Make it Rain! and Farm Away used swipe controls instead of tap to make it more mobile friendly. However, the core mechanic always quickly became a bore, and the appeal of just swiping or tapping as fast as you can to progress is only appealing to some.

Also, due to the nature of the game, prestige mechanics became a necessity. Pushing the player to reset their progress back to the beginning in order to make the growth more manageable and ensure the player still felt growth in the slower endgame. This was never all that appealing to players — so developers had to find clever ways to sidestep the issue and incentivize the full reset.

It’s important to note that this style of game has gone out of fashion. Besides Partymasters (pictured), there haven’t been many successful new titles that only use clicker gameplay or similar. The resurgence of the genre has actually been on taking the progression mechanics learned in this genre and applying it to whole new mechanics, whole new audiences.

#2 Arcade Idle

So what do you do when clicking style gameplay is uninteresting? Take the same progression system mechanics you know work well, and graft it onto more compelling core gameplay. Enter Voodoo, who mastered this approach throughout 2017 and early 2018.

Related Read

Everything you want to know about Voodoo – An Interview with Voodoo Games

In Growth & Marketing, Industry & Market Trends

Tom Kinniburgh

Instead of asking the player to tap to earn their coins, Voodoo asked them to play simple arcade games that have mass appeal. Games like “Idle Invaders” used classic shoot-em-up gameplay (ex. Space Invaders, 1942) to earn their income manually. Shoot down incoming invaders as fast as you can to earn your manual income, and then purchase and upgrade computer-controlled allied fighters to fight alongside you. This made for a compelling formula, that was easily replicated across multiple genres. “Idle Sweeper” took Pac-Man, “Idle Flipper” took flipping style gameplay.

Any simple arcade gameplay which had an opportunity for scaling health/damage and computer-controlled assists could create a compelling new idle game.

Planet Bomber was the first to expand on this formula, adding more depth to the game by adding more types of upgrades. Before, games would offer linear upgrades to damage dealt, or income generated. Planet Bomber now offers upgrades across a number of parallel vectors, all with a variety of importance to the core gameplay. This creates a far more compelling long term strategy, and is what future idle games will need to focus on. How do you find core gameplay that can offer a variety of upgrades that are equally visible and impactful to progress?

#3 Merge Idle

The merge mechanic was first pioneered by games like Triple Town, but turned commercially successful by Gram with Merge Dragons and Merge Town.

Related Read

Deconstructing Merge Town: The Rise of Hyper Casual

In Deconstructions, Monetization

Adam Telfer

Merge style games take out the tiring clicker gameplay and swap it for merging items: drag and drop duplicate items on top of each other to increase their level. What’s a simple premise turns into an addicting experience, because the game always feels like there is something to do. Sessions are impressively long because it’s just so compelling to constantly build up your houses towards the next goal. The next goal is so clear (I want to upgrade my best house), and the path is clear (merge until I get a duplicate) — yet as soon as I complete a goal, I’m compelled to start the next path.

What Merge Town did more than just increase the session length was bring in an entirely different audience. No longer are idle games just about increasing numbers, but giving clear visual progress. This type of gameplay is for a much broader audience than most idle games, yet kept all the engagement mechanics intact.

#4 Idle Simulation

Simulation has been on the decline on mobile for years, with Sim City Build It and Fallout Shelter (arguably) being the last big games in the space. Yet on Idle, in the last year we’ve seen a new face of simulation games: Idle Simulation. Wheras Sim City Build It, Farmville, Hay Day may appeal to a older, broader demographic, Kolibri’s “Idle Miner Tycoon” and “Idle Factory Tycoon” have shown a compelling business case for using classic simulation game loops.

Unlike the previous idle game mechanics, idle simulation games don’t innovate in the core gameplay. In fact, with Idle Miner and Idle Factory — they remove a core mechanic altogether. Tapping fast no longer helps you — the game stays compelling by asking you only to be managing your upgrades, and managing what boosters to start. This used to be an issue for idle games — since idle games typically had to start slow and progress quickly in order to give you a sense of progress, tapping gameplay was an easy out for designers to give a player something to do between upgrades. With simulation games, the upgrades are fast, but also far more strategic. As such, it doesn’t need tapping style gameplay as a crutch.

These games rely on a traditional simulation game loop, similar to compulsion loops you felt in games like Sim City (the original) and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Purchasing one upgrade will strain another system. In Idle Miner, purchasing an upgrade for a mine will mean that mine generates more income per second. This puts a strain on your elevator — the elevator then needs to be upgraded in order to hold on to more resources. Upgrading that elevator will put a strain on your surface level extraction… This goes round and round straining each system giving you new goals with each step and avoiding upgrades feeling stale.

Idle Miner and Idle Factory aren’t the only games that have attempted this and succeeded. I’d recommend playing Crafting Idle Clicker, Reactor Idle, and Factory Idle on Kongregate. This genre has seen the biggest surge in downloads, and there is plenty of room for innovation to come. This is the category to watch for new developers.

#5 Idle Management

One mechanic that hasn’t been done often on mobile, but more often on Kongregate is more “Management” style sims. Check out a game called “Groundhog Life”: this is a life management simulator, with obvious idle characteristics.

The core gameplay is replaced with choosing which system to boost. In Groundhog Life, you can choose how you want to spend your 24 hours each day: spend 8 hours or 2 hours sleeping? Spend more time at work, or studying? While your character is always making progress, whether they are progressing in learning a new skill, earning money, or being happy is down to the decisions you make. Each time you die, you pass on your traits to your next life — giving you a boost depending on your choices in the previous life. While there haven’t been many mobile idle games that have used this mechanic, this is by far the most addictive idle game that I’ve ever played.

#6 Story-driven Idle

Going in a different direction, there’s also innovation happening in how idle games have made prestige (resetting your progress) less punishing and more relevant. Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money by East Side games is a masterclass in this. Many developers have attempted to graft licensed IP onto idle games, but none fit so well as Trailer Park Boys — in the last episode of every TV season, they end up in jail losing everything. East Side baked this into the game design: at the end of each season of generating a ton of cash from idle systems, the boys are caught by the cops and you lose all your money.

Related Read

Designer Diary – Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money

In Design, Deconstructions

Dave Rohrl

This creates a strong narrative arc in the game that makes sense in the idle game loop. Each prestige (which happens more often), the player gets a drip of story. This creates a more interesting long-term goal for the player besides just increasing their numbers.

The game has been a breakout success for East Side Games, and it’s why they’ve been slowly bringing on more licensed IP to work with. Their current game, “The Gang Goes Mobile” based on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is currently in soft launch.

#7 Idle RPG

Lastly, is most likely the biggest in-app purchase revenue generating idle category: RPG.

Clicker Heroes and Tap Titans were arguably the first games in the genre — showing that you can add battle mechanics with an idle progression, but both games actually fit more into category #1 based on their real mechanics. RPG can offer more than just a facade for progress.

Non-stop Knight was the first to break into this space, by adding automatic RPG gameplay as the core, while asking the player to choose when to use their boosters. Instead of linear upgrades, the character then started collecting loot from random drops (thank you Diablo), collecting pets and unlocking new boosts. Non-stop Knight was revolutionary in its time, but in retrospect leaned too heavily on idle progression to make a compelling long-term engagement loop.

The king of Idle RPG is without a doubt Idle Heroes. Instead of leaving too heavily on Idle Progression, they took many of the progression systems from Heroes’ Charge and Galaxy of Heroes. More focus is on a gacha-infused progression system: collect a team of heroes, outfit them with the best possible gear, and compete in limited time events for the currencies you desperately need.

This level of complexity is likely the next step for Idle RPG games. Keeping the compelling simple core gameplay, but creating more strategy in how you create and manage a team of heroes, and building upon an economy which events are necessary to be competitive.

In Summary

As you can see, idle game mechanics support a wide variety of game designs. Don’t just assume the tried-and-tested clicker gameplay is the only option when coming up with idle game ideas.

Idle, unlike most genres on mobile, has a lot of room for innovation. It’s created compelling business cases for many successful gaming companies on mobile, and as a genre has plenty of room for newcomers to enter into. As a designer in this space, I would take a look at what has been done and predict what will come into the future:

• Don’t stick with traditional core gameplay: find new core gameplays that will let you reach new audiences like Merge Town and Idle Invaders
• Add more strategy to the progression: create compelling game loops by using upgrade stats that actually lean on each other. Buying an upgrade in one area will drive you to upgrade in another.
• The market is maturing quickly: don’t underestimate the value of licensed IP or building out a events framework for your live operations.

If you keep this mind, my hope is that the idle market will continue to innovate for years to come!

The post Top 7 Idle Game Mechanics appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Adam Telfer

I believe in the next few years we will see a similar development for game economy designer jobs: ‘analytical game designers’ who work with simulations and support lead designers in iterating on the key game systems.

Article written by Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King

The unique problems of freemium mobile game mechanics

Building successful freemium games includes a very special type of challenge: creating systems that engage players for years and that allow for very deep monetization. All the revenue of a freemium game comes from the slow trickle of small in-game purchases made by a small fraction of the playerbase. This makes it necessary for freemium games to retain players for a long time and avoid putting too low a cap on how much spenders can pay.

In order to achieve a long lifetime, freemium games are built so that players can set strong (short-, medium-, and long-term) goals for themselves. They are then tuned to gradually provide players with a sense of “progression” towards these goals for an experience that can last for years. This generally translates into a need for a lot of “content,” be it new levels, new items, or generally new “things” to get in the game. Now, since most spend in freemium games comes from players who want to accelerate their progression, and since as we said it is important to avoid putting a low cap on how much spenders can spend, this need for “content” is multiplied.

The solution to this type of problem often cannot just be “create more content.” Production of good quality “content” can be both expensive and time-consuming, and that has to be factored in the cost of maintaining a live game. In the case of mobile games, developers also need to keep in mind that there are device limitations in terms of loading times and even disk space in case they want to support old devices.

This pressure on “content” makes freemium system building one of the most difficult and interesting challenges in game development.

Review a game economy early

It is important to look at this “content” dynamic explicitly and in detail before launching a game. There have been a few examples of beautiful, innovative, IP-powered games that have burst into players’ attention (and into the Top Downloads and Top Grossing charts), only to then disappear just a few months later. Not having enough progression or spending depth impeded these titles from becoming new runaway successes.

Furthermore, work on those systems is also best done early in the development process. Mobile games have become big production efforts, with teams of dozens of people. Once a game team becomes that big, two things hinder fast or successful pivots:

• Lead designers become very busy with day-to-day work, which makes it hard for them to take a step back and focus on tasks as big as changing key game systems.
• Since changing key game systems means changing somewhat the “nature” of a game, it is hard to do that more than once or twice before losing the faith of the team or the key game stakeholders.

The problem with reviewing game systems

The issue with trying to review game systems early in the development process is that freemium game systems are both very complicated and abstract. Game system reviews typically happen via conversations and presentations, and sometimes with some high-level prototypes, but those tools are not fit to describe and analyze “content” problems in-depth. Different people are likely to interpret the same presentation or the same words in different ways, and without looking into this in detail, there is the risk of moving to production games lacking a solid plan.

Enter the economy designers

Game economy designers at King are “analytical game designers” who look at games as machines and partner with the lead designer on a game title to transform a vision and a desired player experience into mechanics and parameters. They build simulations of the game mechanics and find answers to questions like, “How long will players need to complete a game?” or “How deep can monetization be in this game?”

Having a game economy designer working in a game team early in the development process allows for the game team to iterate much faster on game systems, months before having these systems implemented in game. A game can then move in production with confidence that enough “content” will be available to allow for years of play and for enough monetization depth.

RPG example

For example, in order to accelerate our iterations on the development of a gear system in an RPG, one of our economy designers developed a small simulator in Python (our preferred language for economy design).

The tool encoded all the mechanics related to the gear system (item drops, gear progression, gacha system). A designer could interact with it and simulate the progression in the game without going through the core mechanics of the gameplay.

This allowed exploring the long-term state of players in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. The project could therefore quickly iterate on different variations on the design of the gear system and eliminate solutions that would have given a poor long-term player experience.

Casual game economies

Simulation is a valuable tool for casual games as well. In one of our latest casual games, players receive many of their rewards through (non-purchasable) mystery boxes. The inherent randomness in the boxes combined with variable progression speeds, skill levels, and play frequencies of players makes it hard to calculate how many rewards players get and when they get them.

In a game as big as a popular casual game, giving a bad experience to “a small percentage of players” could mean impacting millions, so having more control over the player experience becomes very valuable.

Using actual player data to simulate players’ journeys allows us to see how some game logic decisions impact player experience and content pacing, thus allowing for faster iterations before in-market tests.

Simulating players’ journeys allows us to see how game logic decisions impact player experience.

Game economy designers become increasingly important

The mobile gaming industry is still developing. The level of innovation to become a top title is as high as ever before, high quality is a minimum requirement and time to market is critical. To respond to these demands, gaming companies are trying to multiply their attempts at making successful games and are increasing the size of the teams once the games move to production. The more these trends will continue, the stronger the need will be to validate project investments early on, and the more there will be a need for game economy designers.

The discipline is young, with tools and practices still to be discovered, but the potential value to be created in this space is great, and I am convinced that we will have more and more A simulation specialists in this role.

If you’re interested in working with King on Economy design, take a look at their jobs board here.

By Pietro Guardascione, Senior Director of Envelope Design, King
Originally posted on Gamasutra

The post The Rising Need for Game Economy Designers appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Guest Writer

But how do you know if you are picking the right trend? Is there a method to establishing a trend or is it pure luck? Is a trend just beginning, have I missed it, is there still time, is it still worth it?!

These are tough questions and there isn’t a single answer, but there certainly are telltale signs that a trend is developing. Most long term human endeavors create trends. The length of time or the number of events needed to establish a trend can vary wildly across industries. Mobile gaming on the app store is no exception — yet unlike other mediums, free to play apps that feature similar mechanics, themes or audiences can all still achieve financial success. While Candy Crush may be the #1 game in match 3, there have been hundreds of games operating outside of it that still provide sustainable financial success to their developers. You don’t need to be the trendsetter or the #1 game to build a successful business.

A particular mobile gaming trend that caught my eye recently is the hyper casual fishing genre. A genre that until 3 months ago didn’t feature in any charts. Then quickly 3 games all show up. Is this a clear trend — if so should we jump in?

What is a Trend?

Trends are used to describe a change over time “upward trends in stock markets” or “black leather is the hit style of the season”. These casual comments actually mask the fundamentals of a trend which is an observed statistical change in data over time.  People looking at datasets and making predictions on the future based on the performance in the past.

A trend is not a single remarkable data point.

For example, Banksy’s recent stunt of destroying his own art that had been sold in Sotheby’s received huge worldwide publicity, but it isn’t likely that we’re going to see art destruction as a trend.

Trends are all about data and the underlying data is tracking the actions of a population of people.  For a set of data to form a trend it needs to:

1. Be more than two points of data
2. You can’t pick convenient points, it should take all available data
3. The more data points the more reliable the trend, but margins of error always exist.
4. A trend is always historic and is not a guarantee of the future.

Pokemon Go hitting the top of the market in 2016 was a single data point. It would be bold to call that a trend looking at its own success. Now with Walking Dead, Jurassic World Alive, and soon Harry Potter being released — this starts to show as more of an underlying mobile gaming trend towards AR gaming.

A trend always needs multiple data points to confirm it is a trend and most people are only interested in strong trends in either direction.

For the purpose of this article, we will be taking the app store download chart as our data source and discuss whether there are any game genres or mechanics that are causing a splash!

A tale of three Fish

Fishing as a game genre has been popular all the way back from SEGA’s Mega Bass Fishing and this mirrors to some extent it’s popularity as a hobby. However, as a casual game, the original arcade fishing mechanic was first executed well in Ridiculous Fishing by Vlambeer released in 2015.

This game performed very well for the time and also won a number of development awards. Yet it wasn’t designed with the free to play business model, so as a paid app it does not get a large install volume anymore.

Similar to what happend with Threes!, within the last four months, 3 of the largest mobile publishers ( Lion Studios, Kwalee, Voodoo) have each brought their own version of ridiculous fishing to market (Hooked Inc, Go Fish! And The Fish Master).  

Each of these companies identified a gaming trend from years ago — a game that performed well within its market & business model (paid, mobile) that could be easily ported over to their model (hyper-casual). Finding trends doesn’t always have to be about what’s popular now, but also what has been popular, but can find new life today!

Fishing Game Design

Capitalising on a trend still requires differentiation to be successful. Both Go Fish and The Fish Master stay quite faithful to the original Ridiculous Fishing concept where you cast a line deep into the sea and then on the way up you must catch a variety of fish. The larger the fish you catch the more money you earn which allows you to buy upgrades that help you cast deeper, catch more fish or earn more offline currency via an idle mechanic.

This is a very simple, single currency positive feedback loop that doesn’t scale. But it provides ample opportunities to view an ad.  This likely makes it a good mechanic to increase the views per DAU which I wrote about earlier as the primary metric to improve for monetization in free to play.

Based on the game mechanics we’ve seen in hyper casual, fishing games use a very subtle rising mechanic + a small amount of dexterity in order to achieve the most optimal score.  Score is not as critical as other games and enjoyment is replaced by netting rare fish. This works well as it creates a simple random variable reward for players over the longer period as they never know which fish are swimming deep beneath their feet.

Idle Mechanics for retention

Hooked Inc, changes the mechanic and put’s the focus into a more fishing tycoon/management style approach where the focus is placed more on upgrading both your rod and your boat than the fishing itself.  Players have reduced importance on dexterity and more important on upgrade efficiency. tracing your finger across the screen. The aim with Hooked Inc, is to slowly increase the size and strength of your boat to lead yourself to the more lucrative waters. The core loop remains the same as above but there is a deeper idle mechanic and a larger number of upgrade choices.

In each case, the primary monetization is video ads, but Go Fish! And Hooked Inc contains more premium currency upgrades to increase the rate at which you can earn more soft currency.  If I had to rank them in terms of game design depth:

 The Fishmaster  < Go Fish! < Hooked Inc 

    (least depth) ———————- (most depth)

Beginning the Trend

What’s most interesting about this particular genre is that it has been dead since Ridiculous Fishing, a premium game that was barely doing 100 downloads a day. There has been no other top performing fishing titles since 2015. Then, in the space of 3 months, 3 casual games appeared and together they have amassed 10,000,000 downloads. The question is, why?

The mechanic itself lends itself to the hyper casual business model due to it’s short rounds, simple progression and one finger click and drag mechanics. This could have been the reason Voodoo attempted to grow The Fish Master originally. During that period the market itself was responding to the idea of a simple fishing game, but as we noted earlier one data point is not a trend.

Fast Follow

Due to the size of the 3 companies that each entered the market, it’s safe to assume that each of them is aware of one another. In the Hyper Casual space, this means keeping tabs, being fast to market, iterating on success or killing failures quickly. Fish Master (Kwalee) quickly built upon the game feel, improving the speed, transitions, casting feeling and the complexity of finding rare fish. However,  they didn’t stray too far out of bounds of the simple game mechanic – dropping a hook to catch some fish. Kwalee also made smart decisions, to focus on the hook drag, adding a small amount of skill and luck for the user so that they would reach their maximum load more quickly, but through skill you could catch bigger fish if you focus on where to drag.

This subtle change made the game feel more challenging. This seems to be just the right balance as quite quickly they rose faster and higher in the charts.  

Hooked Inc (Lion Studios) is a fundamentally different game as it’s idle compared to dexterity, but one that’s attacking the same audience.  Idle mechanics, which rely on upgrading large numbers of stats in order to earn more revenue quickly have less general appeal but still appeal to a gaming audience.  Based on the download figures it was harder to sustain and grow the installs, most likely due to CPI. You would hope that a higher LTV from the idle mechanics would allow for longer marketing growth, but again the charts points to a down trend. Exact LTVs for Hyper Casual are very hard to tell due to Ad Revenues being obscured from Sensor Tower Analysis.  

For the mobile gaming trend to be more significant and longer lasting, we would look for 3 major signs. Firstly the longer a single app can sustain larger install numbers. If a second data point then showed a higher but flatter drop in installs after it’s peak and then if the third data point could maintain a new and similar peak so that the install rate of all the apps together was much higher.

Sustaining the Trend

As fast as the trend appears the data shows it’s already reducing in volume. Fishing games have fallen out of the top 100 in general, and none of the 3 games covered has been a clear winner. Go Fish! By Kwalee was the most successful in terms of downloads, but the mechanic and depth of the gameplay has not led to sustained chart position.

There is also a large unknown in how much each of these companies was spending on marketing. Sustaining on the app store now requires large amounts of cash to push users into apps to get them up the store.  In each case, it looks like the profitability of the campaigns wasn’t high enough to maintain strong organic growth, leaving the apps to flounder. For a mobile gaming trend to really sustain it must usually lead to actions that are natural (no marketing), viral (increasing K-Factor) and adopted by the majority.

The most interesting trend at the moment is that of Fortnite which has truly captured the imagination of the youth and can often be seen where people are referencing things from the game in real life. Take for instance the real-life dance challenges that are also run digitally too.  A trend like this sustains itself with user-generated content, but Epic is doing a great job of sustaining momentum through their Season based approach and ever developing storyline and character plots.

When to jump on a trend and when not?

As we’ve seen in the Fishing trend, most of the pointers are already pointing down. Within 3 short months, a huge number of people had begun to play a fishing game, but the sustain wasn’t there. It would, therefore, be naive to believe that you can buck the global trend with a new fishing game.

However, the simplicity of the gameplay and the clear appetite for downloads initially means that with just enough of a twist or blend from Ridiculous, Hooked, Go Fish or Fish Master an audience awaits. Assessing how much revenue potential there is behind that audience is another blog post all. Happy Trendsetting!

The post Fishing for Trends on the App Store appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

1. A lot of your games are clearly inspired by others in the market, how do you take steps to differentiate them from each other?

The studios we work with have a huge amount of independence and autonomy when it comes to the conception of new games. This freedom is very important to them and we wouldn’t want to limit their creativity. As with any other artistic sector (movies, music, painting etc.), it is natural that studios will be inspired by what others do. We try to go beyond that and encourage studios to be innovative and create something new and disruptive. In coaching studios, we regularly push them beyond their comfort zone, particularly when it comes to game ideation. We also provide more specific feedback and guidance at later stages of the prototyping cycle. Just to take an example among many, with “Perfect Hit case study,” a hit we launched in August, we were able to take a game with a 9% D7 retention to a 15% D7 retention by making fundamental changes to the gameplay. But we went further and tipped the scale for both the D7 retention (22%) and CPI ($0.15) with a creative addition to the game, both to the visuals and to the game feeling. By layering each level on top of each other (essentially adding a hole in end-of-level targets), we transformed a good prototype into a major hit. In this case, the idea itself originated in the publishing team and was brilliantly executed by the developer.

2. How much value does differentiation have in the market? How do you decide how much differentiation is good?

Differentiation is important because an innovative gameplay will have more chances of being successful. For example with the hit game Tenkyu the initial prototype’s gameplay was based on the classic game where you navigate a marble through a tilting board. This was too static and not particularly innovative. The main twist we worked on with the developer was to add layered platforms of different shapes, so the marble would fall from one maze to the other. After this big change D1 and D7 retention went through the roof!

3. How many games does Voodoo publish on a monthly basis? How many games are cancelled in soft launch vs globally launched?

We’re on an upward trend at the moment. On average we’re looking at 4 games per month. A studio can expect to publish a first hit game after 5-10 prototypes on average; subsequent hits are typically even more frequent.

4. What % of developers that you discuss with do you end up actually working with?

All of them! We are very tech-focused: we have built a platform that has allowed us to scale our efforts. This dashboard allows developers to access Voodoo’s growing knowledge library, and also to test their prototypes to get data. Voodoo’s dashboard is unique on the market– every studio we work with can launch free test campaigns for their prototypes, from Day 1.

Thanks to this dashboard, our partner studios are informed, in a matter of days, of whether their game is a future Hit, a prototype with high potential, or a prototype to ‘kill’. Whilst we’re very proud of this dashboard, we’re aware it’s far from perfect; we’re constantly bringing improvements to it based on the developers’ feedback.

5. How have the success-criteria KPIs changed for hyper casual games over the last year? (CPI, D1 Retention, Videos/DAU, Adoption, etc.) 

Our historic KPIs have been successful indicators to date, so we’ve used them consistently. We are open to revisiting our KPIs; at the end of the day, it’s about the LTV of users, and there’s only so much a seven-day retention will capture.

6. What metrics do you typically look at when a game is in soft launch? How do you run a campaign in soft launch to ensure these metrics are measurable?

We typically look at retention (D1 over 50% and D7 over 20%), as well as a low CPI.

7. It seems like there has been some blending of Idle mechanics and Hyper casual mechanics over time — do you see this as a lasting trend or just a fad in audience tastes?

Idle is an interesting mechanic that can definitely help with long-term retention. However, integrating it in hyper casual games should be decided on a case-by-case basis. This wouldn’t work well on a game like Helix Jump, or Hole.io for example.

8. Testing & developing UA Creatives seem like an incredibly important part of your process. Any recommendations for other developers on what types of creatives work for hyper casual games?

If you work with us we will take care of all of the creative ad work. We’ve got a really talented and wacky team of artists who will test out a lot of creatives every single day. This means that the developers we work with can really focus on what they do best and what they enjoy the most: building amazing games! This is particularly relevant for smaller studios. When we worked with H8 to develop Helix Jump, their small team was able to focus on developing innovative and crazy prototypes, rather than on developing creatives. This approach was more effective, time-efficient and eventually led to Helix Jump.  Part of the “Voodoo” mindset we encourage studios to adopt is to focus on what they do best and where the value really lies i.e. game development.

9. What role do you think demographics of gamers play in a game’s CPI?

It’s really important to build a game that works well with men and women at the same time. If CPI is low in those two demographics, then you are much more likely to have a big hit! Otherwise, if you have a low CPI with men, but high with women (which is often the case), then you’re cutting yourself from half of the market!
Some features to consider when building gender-balanced games include gameplay (contemplative vs too competitive) and color scheme (pastel vs too vivid). Ultimately, we study each game’s data individually to develop a strategy to achieve this balance.

10. What do you believe are the next opportunities in Hyper Casual? (genre, mechanics, audience)

We’ve seen a recent surge in .io games and multiplayer games, and a shorter ‘incremental game’ trend before that. We don’t claim to consistently call hyper casual trends ahead of the curve, but trends have begun as a result of a conversation between our publishing managers and our partner studios in the past.

11. What do you believe the next threats are in Hyper Casual? What do you think will change as new developers and established companies enter the fray?

The biggest challenge we face is time to market. We know that our partner studios will publish hit games down the line, but our work is to help them get there in record time. Whether it takes 5, 10 or 15 prototypes to get there makes a big difference for our partners, and we are always looking for ways to reduce this lead time.

12. Hyper Casual is becoming more and more competitive, do you see any other promising developers in the space?

There are always promising developers out there! We like to work with developers that have raw talent and that are hungry for success, regardless of location or the size of the team.
The studio OHM Games is extremely promising. They have a great vision, excellent creative talent, and the team is very focused and united. They’ve recently launched two successful games, “Knock Balls” and “Wall Clean,” and we have no doubt they will break the top charts again.

13. Can you tell us about some of the developers you’ve helped succeed?

I think the Flappy Dunk Success Story is a great one. Paul Breton and Clément Germanicus, around 25 to 27 years old, french and cousins.

The gameplay was too difficult and the controls were not intuitive at all but we felt otherwise the game was well executed and the idea was original. We schedule a meeting and we felt immediately the good vibe and strong energy from Paul. We immediately got along and we created almost a friendship relationship. 

So we tested their game Madwad and the results were terrible. High CPI and low retention. At the time, we were doing a hackathon at Voodoo so I suggested to Paul to follow our rhythm and create a game in 48h. He accepted and all we needed was an idea. It was early 2017 and Ketchapp was totally leading the hyper casual market. But we were not fans of how they balanced their games. Theirs were too cold, too minimalistic and, most of all, too hard! I was playing HopHopHop at the time but was really frustrated with a lot of small details in the game.

I asked Paul what he thought about the game and he told me he was playing it as well and had the exact same feeling as me. We knew what to do. Two days later we were playing Flappy Dunk.

The game did millions of downloads and still growing.

14. What is the typical lifespan for a hyper casual game? How long does an average successful game remain in the charts? What typically restricts their lifespan versus a typical free to play mobile game?

Only time will tell! Some of our biggest hits seem to defy gravity and remain very popular. Take Snake vs Block for example: it came out in May 2017 and is still comfortably in the top 100 ranking in the US on iOS. Hyper casual is such a new market, we simply don’t know the limits yet!

Thanks for a great interview Alex! If you’re interested in working with Voodoo you can get in touch with them over on their main site.

The post Everything you want to know about Voodoo – An Interview with Voodoo Games appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh

Tim Sweeney stated in an interview with PocketGamer “On open platforms, 30 per cent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform.” As a large developer with capable resources, you want to minimise the cost of doing business and maximise the value you create from your investment (4 years of development creating the Tech and IP of Fortnite).  The 30% fee does capture more than simple services, it simplifies the process of installing apps for consumer and developer. Separating games on multiple stores, players are forced to subscribe to separate billing, subscription and authentication models. This has happened before on PC – Blizzard, Valve, EA, each created their own storefronts, each taking a substantial cut and moving their own content behind a walled garden. Fortnite also uses an “Epic” owned launcher on PC. The Fragmentation that happened on PC also exists on mobile but has been isolated to the Chinese mobile market.

Read our Free to Play Bible for Mobile Game Design Here

The state of Chinese App Store Fragmentation

When Google opted to leave China in 2010, it did so, mainly because of privacy and censorship issues. The way the Chinese government control and monitor organisations within China is at odds with how Google saw how they did business. China responded by blocking all of Google services including the Google Play Marketplace. This left a cavernous hole for Chinese mobile looking to download apps. This led to a proliferation of stores, mainly growing either through one core app (Tencent’s WeChat) or bundling App Stores as the default on device (Huawei or Xiaomi MIUI) fast-forward to 2018 and the largest, Tencent MyApp, still only has 13.49% of the market.

Because of this fragmentation, consumers and developers suffer. To have effective distribution in China, a game developer ends up having to work with a Chinese distribution agent. These agents serve no one but themselves skimming off the top of any IAP made from any store. Each store may also install their own bloatware or spyware and the potential errors with different payment processors can cause crashing or errors. This adds nothing but complexity for the developer and in the end most developers sacrifice more than 30% of their gross revenue. Although this scenario is highly unlikely in the West, it shows you what happens without a central standard such as the Google Play Store.

Large Content Owners

Fortnite is a phenomenon, but on mobile the largest games command huge loyal audiences. Depending on the results of this it would be quite easy for Supercell, King or Microsoft to move Clash Royale, Candy Crush and Minecraft onto their own store fronts or self hosted apk’s. This may not be as far fetched as possible because for a ROI point of view if you have a game that grossed 1 billion dollars in a year, 30% is a huge tax to pay. When you also compare this to the Hyper Casual business model where they avoid all store tax and monetize directly through Ad Revenue, you can see where the margins are being eroded.

Larger studios will be watching for consumers reactions and the general fallout in issues, and if Epic does well, you can expect EA, Activision and Ubisoft to be considering their options. Content is often King, but ease of use trumps all.  Unless these studios can bundle their app stores with devices they will face a similar issues to the Amazon App Store.

The Tencent in the room

Epic and their parent company Tencent (who owns a 40% stake in Epic) might have known this all along. Tencent already control the largest app store in China, MyApp. If they could leverage that single killer app, then could they effectively launch MyApp for the west? This certainly seems feasible, but in the short term unlikely. MyApp is very much geared towards the Chinese market with the majority of apps only available in Chinese or other Eastern languages.

Epic have likely made this play primarily “To avoid the 30% store tax” yet a prebuilt app store with billing, verification and apk management could save them time. Couple this with the fact that Epic also own the unreal engine and you might see that an Unreal App Store, kick started by the MyApp technology might only be a year away? This all might seem quite far fetched because we’re all used to Google being in the driving seat with Android, but unlike Apple, they don’t own the Devices, nor the operating system.

This all doesn’t look great for Google. It also can’t have a clean solution to the problem as any change of it’s business strategy reduce it’s profitability. Does it lose the largest mobile game of 2017, or does it reduce it’s cut for all developers? In the long run is store dominance worth maintaining at reduced profitability?

Remembering the consumer

Forgetting about the 30% store tax, it’s still the gamer that loses. More stores mean more options, more registration, more billing channels, more confusion. This isn’t as good as a single safe space, such as Google Play.  Gamers want to play Fortnite and most of them will jump through whatever hoops are positioned in their way. Along with the fact that the game is multi-channel, it means that Epic can educate people on all channels, in turn helping those with Android devices.

In the interviews with Tim Sweeney, links to Rogue APKs formed a large criticism of the move away from Play Store. The fact that bad actors will exist is not something Epic can prevent, but the issue seems overblown. Although a small number of consumers fall for bad software tricks every day, most don’t and most follow recommendations by friends. If Epic does a clear marketing campaign and uses the game on other operating systems to push the users the correct download link, this can easily be avoided.

What Epic is giving up, is the huge audience sat there with Google Play already installed. This along with any potential promotion that Google might provide is.  Whether this loss is worth the 30% extra is hard to say but one thing’s for sure, if any game could do it, Fortnite is large enough to try it, but will other developers follow? Is there a percentage that would make Epic stay, I doubt it. This may be one more headache for Google Play, but not necessarily it’s downfall.

The post Fortnite rejects Google Play Store, should Google be scared? appeared first on Mobile Free to Play, written by Tom Kinniburgh