Insights and tips about the games industry

2019 was a brilliant year for mobile games. We witnessed some fantastic titles coming out every month, full to the brim with fresh ideas, vibrant stories, new mechanics, stunning art, and more. We’re now on to a new year of gaming, but before we start looking at what 2020 will bring, let’s round-up the year with some of the best games released in December. With so much free time over the Christmas break, I’ve spent hours trying out so many titles (old and new). But to keep things consistent, I’ve trimmed my list down and delved into what I think are the top 5 games released last month, while explaining what exactly made them stand out. Let’s get to it! 1. Necrosphere Developer: Cat Nigiri Launch date: December 2nd, 2019 Price: $2.99 / £5.79 Available on: iOS & Steam Necrosphere...

Happy New Year! Welcome back to our series on what we can learn from the best games of 2019. And how the big trend has been simplicity. In parts one and two, Kelly and Sarah have covered story-driven games and casual games. So to end the series, I’ll be sharing three of my favorite mobile games from last year – all of which have a multiplayer aspect. 7. Magic Brick Wars Developer: Halfbrick Studios Release date: 15th November 2019 Available on: Android, iOS Price: Free with in-app purchases Genre: Multiplayer strategy Inspired by card-building and auto-chess Magic Brick Wars is a mix between a tower-defense, a card-builder, and an auto-chess game. These are all similar genres anyway, but Magic Brick Wars brings it all together pretty well. You put down barriers and monsters on your side of the field who...

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

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

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

Welcome back to our series on what we can learn from the best games of 2019. And how the big trend has been simplicity. So far we’ve focused on storytelling and choices in games. But for this post, I’ll be going over my top three favorite titles of 2019 (which are more casual games), and what we can learn from them. In the wrong place? Head back to part one, or skip ahead to part three. 4. Grindstone Developer: Capybara Games Release date: 19th September 2019 Available on: iOS Price: Free with Apple Arcade Genre: Casual | Puzzle game A puzzle game with a twist In Grindstone, you draw a line through coloured enemies who sit in a grid. Doing this gets you gems. It’s similar to games like Candy Crush. But it’s so much more. First, you’re a mad...

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

Over 2019, we spotted a very clear trend. We’re not talking about the obvious surge of battle royale, auto-chess or roguelike games. We’re talking about the more subtle iterations, as developers revamp and refine their mechanics. That trend is simplicity. So in this three-part series, Sarah, Chay, and I will be looking back at nine of the most intriguing developments this year, why they stood out, and what we should remember in 2020. Kicking off the series myself, I’m excited to share with you my top three picks of 2019 – coincidentally, they’re all story-driven mobile games. If you like, you can skip to part two and part three. 1. Sky: Children of the Light Developer: Thatgamecompany Release date: 18th July 2019 Available on: iOS, Android and Apple TV Price: Free Genre: Adventure | RPG Beautiful, artistic exploration Children of...

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

Here at GameAnalytics, we receive, store and process game events from 1.2 billion monthly players in nearly 90,000 games. These events all pass through a system we call the data collection API, which forwards the events to other internal systems so that we eventually end up with statistics and graphs on a dashboard, displaying user activity, game revenue, and more. The data collection API is fairly simple in principle: games send events to us as JSON objects through HTTP POST requests, and we send a short response and take the event from there. Clients either use one of our SDKs or invoke our REST API directly. We get approximately five billion requests per day, each typically containing two or three events for a total of a few kilobytes. The response is a simple HTTP 200 “OK” response with a small...

Despite November being a slower month for new releases, I’ve had my hands full with exciting new games to try out! And despite Apple Arcade launching new titles every month, I’ve turned my attention away from the new service, and back to what you indie developers have been publishing. So as always, I’ve cherry-picked five brilliant games I played last month, and shared exactly why these games caught my eye, and what developers, like you, can learn from them. Let’s get started. 1. Figment Developer: Bedtime Digital Games Launch date: November 28th, 2019 Price: First Chapter is free, then it’s $4.99 to unlock the full game. Available on: iOS, Steam, Switch, Playstation The developers at Bedtime Digital Games have created yet another magical title, again looking like something out of a children’s dreams. This action/adventure game follows the story of...

Back in October, we held our second Making Hit Casual Games event, this time focusing on idle games. As usual, we invited the best minds within this particular genre, and was joined by idle experts Homa Games and Kolibri Games. If you would like to see what expert advice they shared, you can find a copy of their decks and recordings here. But for this post, we’ll be digging into our very own session ‘The Latest Trends for Idle Games”, while seeing how idle particularly compares to the hyper-casual genre. Here’s a copy of the recording, if you’d prefer to watch instead. A bit about our data We featured a heck of a lot of insights in this talk, with aggregated data from over 1.2 billion monthly players, across 80K games from Q3 2018 through to Q2 2019. For this...