Insights and tips about the games industry

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Kalle Heikkinen, Chief Game Analyst at GameRefinery. With almost 400 game analysed under his belt, Kalle has a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t in the mobile game market. Bringing your mobile game to the Asian markets probably crosses every publisher’s and developer’s mind at some point. Along with opportunities, the Eastern markets also present formidable challenges from legislative red tape in China to the specific tastes of Japanese gamers. Moreover, the local publishers in these markets seem to have somewhat of a home-field advantage knowing the ins and outs of how to operate. However, a decent number of Western mobile games have been able to gain a foothold in these markets and rise in the top grossing charts. But what are these games? Which genres do they represent? To answer these...

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Sunny Cha, VP of Marketing at Tenjin. Having worked in previous companies including Tapjoy, Animaco and Gaming Insiders, Sunny brings her extensive experience to the mobile industry. Mobile game publishing is undergoing a dramatic paradigm shift, and hyper casual games are at the center of it all. Characterized by their short engagement loops, low retention, and ad-based monetization, hyper casual titles represent a stark departure from the whale-driven, IAP-centric, tentpole economies traditionally found in the social casino and build & battle genres. This new publishing approach, which has allowed innovators like Voodoo to attract investor attention to the tune of an estimated $200 million, is the product of a disciplined, data-driven approach to growth. By unifying the traditionally disparate practices of user acquisition and mobile ad monetization, data scientists are constructing efficient growth engines to...

Being one of the five biggest developers on Facebook Messenger, I spoke with Alexander Krug, CEO of SOFTGAMES, to learn about the history of the studio, and how they use analytics to monitor their successful portfolio of HTML5 messenger games.  SOFTGAMES is the world’s largest HTML5 games platform with a pretty awesome vision. Can you give us some background into how it all started? Our journey began in 2006 as a four-person startup in Berlin. At that time, we exclusively developed J2ME Games for all major German television channels such as ProSieben, Sat.1 or RTL, and built titles for TV shows like “Germany’s Next Top Model” or “Formula 1”. The market witnessed a drastic change with the release of the iPhone 3G in 2008. After Steve Job’s open letter “Thoughts on Flash” in 2010 announcing that Flash won’t be allowed...

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably at least thought about creating your own game. But if you’re not an experienced programmer and especially if you’re not involved in the game development world at the moment, it probably seems intimidating. And for good reason! That’s because it’s tough to create a game completely from scratch – so tough, in fact, that there are there are thousands of game engines out there. So which one is right for you? To help you choose, we’ve narrowed down what you need to consider in a games engine when creating your game. [bctt tweet=”Which game engine is right for you? To help you choose, @GameAnalytics narrowed down what you need to consider in an engine when creating your game.” via=”no”] The Basics Of Choosing A Game Engine The most important thing you’ll want to consider...

Editors Note: In June 2019, we held an event dedicated to making hit hyper-casual games. Alongside GameAnalytics, we were joined by publishing giants, Voodoo, and Kawaii specialists, Platonic Games, to share the latest stats, trends, and insights when making hit hyper-casual games. You can find all of the info, decks, and videos from the event here.  As a relatively new genre, we’re rapidly witnessing changing trends with hyper-casual games, as well as seeing regular new titles fighting for top positions on the app store. With this in mind, relying on tired marketing strategies or an ill-informed idea that free-to-play titles don’t need a marketing budget won’t do you any favours. When monetizing your hyper-casual game, you’ll want to focus on getting as many people playing as quickly as possible, but also make sure they come back. Usually, if a hyper-casual...

Wouldn’t it be awesome if your players spent money within your game all of the time? While building a community that spends actual currency in your game’s environment is certainly difficult, it’s not impossible. In-app purchases are a huge form of income for the mobile gaming world, and is only getting more and more popular. This chart from Statista shows just how comfortable users are becoming with making purchases on their mobile devices. The million dollar question every game developer is asking is ‘how can I take advantage of this?’ It all comes back to the game, and your data. By analyzing your users behavior you can better optimize your gameplay so not only will your users have a better experience, you’ll also be able to get them to perform your desired actions. Before you can do this however, you...

Being lean is more just than a tech industry buzzword, it’s a way of life – or at least a smart way of doing business. That applies to many different categories, but especially analytics, and definitely so when you need to figure out your minimum viable analytics. With most analytics programs (including ours) you get a ton of information, but as it’s commonly said – if you can’t measure it then you can’t improve upon it. We’ll build on that further by saying that if you and your team can’t easily track, consume, and find actionable data in your analytics reports, then what’s the point of tracking everything? You’ll likely end up wasting a lot of time and effort on something unnecessary when you have better things to do – like improving your game or working on new ones. That’s...

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Om Tandon, Director of User Experience at Digit. With over 14 years experience, Om specializes in UX design, UI design and User Interaction, and has previously worked at Gameloft and June Software.  Is it just me or are UX playbooks, UX pattern libraries, UX style guides not talked about enough? Or incorporated as often as UI style guides or brand style guides? Are these just buzzwords or do they really not matter? Or is there some kernel of truth and real benefit of creating them, be it in games or enterprise softwares and apps? Before we start talking about the HOW, it is inherently important to ask WHY. Why do you even need a UX playbook, pattern library or style guide in first place? The origins Style guides have been around for a long long...

China is the biggest mobile gaming market on the planet. It’s also one of the most challenging markets. But it doesn't have to be.

A new opportunity When they were invited by Facebook to become one of only 15 launch partners on Instant Games, SOFTGAMES immediately understood the massive opportunity. Since then it became the mission of the world’s largest HTML5 games provider to enhance the overall Messenger games experience… and in this pursuit, they’ve now released a string of hit titles, including Cookie Crush, Solitaire Story, and Bubble Shooter HD. One cornerstone of their ongoing success is the focus on high-quality games that they tailor precisely to the features available on certain platforms, such as leaderboards or progress syncing on FB Messenger. For this successful studio, measuring, understanding, and balancing progression flows with a considered focus of these platform-specific features is the key to driving and accelerating growth. They supplement this by listening to their community and quickly actioning the feedback, constantly optimizing...

So first, what’s the story behind Claws of Furry? I created Terahard Studios about 5 to 6 years ago, and about a year ago we started making a prototype for a platformer. We were playing around with a few different concepts, but the idea of cats being ninjas stuck straight away and was one of the first concepts we tried and we loved it. We changed the shape of it a few times to make it more interesting – and the version we’ve shown here is the version that stuck with us – and the more we played the game and the more we were making it, while still playing it every day, we tried to make it more extreme. We had a lot of little different fun mechanics added in that almost compliment each other; you can fight quickly,...

If you’re a game developer, chances are that you’re running some native ads. Or if not, you’re probably at least thinking about it, because properly done native ads can be incredibly successful and lucrative. However, there are a lot of reasons they are the next big thing in mobile advertising, so let’s dig into how you can best execute native advertising in your game(s). Let’s start by defining what a native ad actually is. Generally, a native ad is considered any type of digital ad that echoes or follows the form and function of the platform on which it appears. And in most cases, the value of a native is the fact that properly deployed, they don’t feel like ads at all. Which is why they can be so successful if they are carefully executed, tracked, and measured – and...