Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Arttu Anttonen, Game Analyst. Aside from turning Chinese games inside out, Arttu has a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t in the mobile game market in the East. Everyone working with mobile games in the West already knows Archero. The successful shoot-em-up style ARPG-esque roguelike-ish action game, where players clear sequences of short levels of enemies with their archer hero while avoiding getting shot themselves. And, since many Western game developers struggle with the age-old dilemma of how to make their game more appealing to the Chinese audience, you could be asking yourself: “What would Chinese Archero look like?” Baozou Daxia has been grossing steadily since launch (source: GameRefinery service). Well, a textbook example of how to do it emerged in early September, although made by a Chinese developer, Dream of...

100k titles. 1.2 billion+ MAU. A whole heck of a lot of data. Let's look at the state of the mobile games industry.

Using data from our portfolio of up to 100,000 mobile games, our Director of Customer Operations, Ivan Bravo, kicked off our event with an industry update, sharing the freshest insights and KPIs for the idle category. If you fancy watching the other talks from our event, you can check them out here: The Story of Idle World – Homa Games What we learned: Idle Miner Tycoon and Idle Factory Tycoon – Kolibri Hyper-Casual vs Idle: The Latest Trends in Mobile Games 

If you haven’t seen the news, then let me be the first to tell you that we’ve recently released our latest — and biggest to date — mobile benchmarks report. Now covering 1.2 billion monthly active players across nearly 100k games, we’ve highlighted the key trends and insights from H1 2019, so that you can see how your title truly compares to the rest of the industry. Short on time? Not a problem. In this post, we’ve summarised the key takeaways from this study, and what this means for mobile game developers around the globe. Don’t forget to download yourself a free copy here for later 👇 How to read our graphs We’re packing a whole lot of data into one report, with analysis that covers both seasonal trends and breakdowns by genre. So, to keep things simple, we presented...

Topping the charts Speaking at Casual Connect Europe in London, CEO Alexandre Yazdi said that Voodoo was on track to reach 6 billion downloads for its games in 2022. In fact, as of 2020, Voodoo games have now been downloaded more than 1 billion times. “The Voodoo process is less of a secret and more of a mindset, a way of working.” Alexandre Yazdi, Voodoo CEO  Where it all began Voodoo started as a small team developing and releasing their own creations, and they weren’t immediately successful. What initially began as a failed attempt to bring the titles Bool and Quiz Run to market set in motion an epic journey as a publisher focusing on honing game retention, UA, and monetization optimization. The first chart-topper of Voodoo as a publisher was Paper.io, which became their first major hit back in...

Using data from our portfolio of 74,000+ mobile games, we kicked off our event with an industry update and shared the freshest insights and KPIs for the hyper-casual category (as well as news about our upcoming features). If you fancy watching the other talks from this event, you can find them here: How We Found A Hyper-Casual Niche – Platonic Games Hyper-casual in a Hyper-competitive Market – Voodoo

Editors note: we release bi-annual mobile gaming benchmarks report which pretty much includes all of the metrics mentioned below. Compare how your game is performing against up to 100,000+ games in the industry here. More and more developers can now be seen dipping their toes into the casual and hyper-casual ocean. We know that these relatively new categories are leading the way in the games industry, but how do they really compare to the more established genres? You may have seen our previous benchmarks report (you can find it here, if you haven’t), but this time we’ve pulled fresh data, with a focus on the Arcade and Casual genre. If you’re considering starting work on a casual game or have just produced one, this post is just for you. Before we get started, we should let you know that this data...

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Kalle Heikkinen, Chief Game Analyst at GameRefinery. With over 400 games analyzed under his belt, Kalle has a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t in the mobile game market. 800 million mobile internet users, 550 million mobile gamers, 18 billion dollars of annual revenues – the Chinese mobile games market is like no other; attractive and unignorable. The market is a minefield of challenges as well though. From finding the right publishing partner to adjusting to the quirks of the Chinese government (we all remember what happened with approving new game licenses last year). With that said, it is more important than ever to know what the landscape of the world’s biggest mobile games market looks like. In this blog post, our friends at GameRefinery make an attempt to chart it in terms of:...

A couple of months ago, GameRefinery took a look at the Match3 market and RPG market to see what types of games are driving revenues there. In this blog post, they shift their focus to mobile Sports & Racing games and examine how various games in this category are currently faring on the market. Before we dive further into the data, it’s good to understand how GameRefinery views the mobile games market in terms of genres and game types. In order to classify games in a meaningful way, they take into consideration games’ feature-set, theme and defining mechanics, resulting in a three-layered taxonomy where every game is assigned into a one (and only one) i) Category -> ii) Genre -> iii) Subgenre. For example, Summoners War would go under Midcore -> RPG -> Turn-based RPG. If you’re interested in reading more about...

Whether it’s your game concept or your core game features, prototyping and testing ideas at an early stage can you let you know a lot about the health of your game, and more specifically, if people are actually going to enjoy it. Ideally, you’ll want to make sure your title is popular the moment it hits the market. Not only is testing in the early stages of development good for getting your game out there, but it can also help you focus your production process on features that will make the most impact on your intended audience. In this post, you’ll find the steps you need to take when conducting user research during that all-important prototype phase. We’ll include a bunch of different examples of specific test methods (with pros and cons of each) as well as advice for pulling...

In this post, you'll get a sneak peak into how we improved our infrastructure deployment practices, all by utilising the “Blue-Green deployment approach”.

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Erno Kiiski, Chief Game Analyst at GameRefinery. In his job, he’s played and analyzed hundreds of titles on a feature level, giving him a strong sense of the current mobile game market. This time round, our friends at GameRefinery take a look at the visual elements of top mobile games on the market. They take a deep dive into which game art styles and genres are rocking the US, Chinese and Japanese markets, breaking data down on a game category level to understand their popularity in different game types. Before diving deeper, it’s good to understand how GameRefinery view the mobile game market in terms of genres and game types. In order to classify games in a meaningful way, they take into consideration games’ feature-set, theme and defining mechanics. This creates a three-layered...