What exactly should you be focusing on this year? What are the trends that will really impact your development? We’ve dug through the most popular trends and brought together the topics you should keep an eye on in 2024. 1. Learn about AI and Machine Learning With the release of Google’s Gemini, we’re seeing AI continue to explode. It won’t be long before it’s a common tool that we all use day to day. Getting to grips with how it works is going to be essential, particularly in gaming. At the same time, we’re seeing hyper-casual games shift to richer and deeper experiences – becoming hybrid-casual. In fact, the number of hyper-casual games dropped by 18%, while hybrid-casual grew by 13%, according to Sensor Tower. By their nature, hybrid-casual games have a longer development cycle than hyper-casual games. Using AI...

As we enter the new year, the anticipation is high for the unfolding trends that are about to redefine how we create and play games—from AI seamlessly crafting entire game worlds to the ongoing rise of mobile gaming popularity, where developers refine strategies to extend engagement and enhance monetization, alongside their focus on diversity and sustainability. AI keeps revolutionizing development dynamics Traditionally, creating expansive open-world games with stunning graphics required large teams and significant time investments. But lately, AI is becoming a leader in a new era where even smaller studios and indie developers gain access to tools enabling the next generation of artwork. That includes the creation of entire worlds through procedural techniques, dynamic dialogue generation, or even players’ live avatar integration within the game. These AI technologies are currently in their early stages, but the trajectory is clear...

Protecting yourself isn’t necessarily hard. Not if you’re aware of the techniques hackers use. So, with data breaches becoming increasingly common in the news, we thought we’d give a little advice about how to protect yourself.

While you can’t (yet) plug in a prompt and have it develop a fully functional mobile game, you can use AI to help you come up with ideas and speed up your process. So here are a few ways you can use AI when developing your prototypes.

Adapting your game to mobile is no walk in the park. Yoru controls are different, you have a much smaller screen size, and you're much more limited with the hardware. And yet, Psyonix nailed this perfectly. Here’s what we can learn from them.

Out of all the many mobile industry benchmarks, it’s important to keep player retention rates top of mind. Retention allows marketers to understand when, and perhaps why, a user leaves their game — which gives you the ability to slow the rate down and keep your users around. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of mobile game retention rates and some of the secrets game marketing pros deploy to reduce churn, as well as look at how you can learn from your retention metrics. What’s The Point of Retention Rate? Retention rates are a key indicator of game growth and its health. Not only does a game with better retention likely mean players enjoy using it, but good retention also means it can generate revenue quickly. In the meantime, low retention means rapid user churn, lower user reviews, and...

Working with social media influencers can open up an ocean of new players for your games. But who are the best influencers to work with? How do you go about finding them? And how can you get in touch with them?

You want your players to be engaged with your game, but you don’t want to accidentally break the trust you’ve built up. When developers overpromise and don’t deliver, it can damage their relationship with their audience. Here are our top tips for building hype safely.

Every company has its ups and downs. But it’s how they regroup that matters. And Zynga is no different. so we thought we’d dive into what they did and how they came out the other side as one of the most successful mobile gaming companies in the world. We dive into Zynga’s strategy and how they recovered from losing half their revenue to rise back to $720 million a quarter.

Tennis Clash was one of the most downloaded mobile games in 78 countries when it launched. And it’s had over 50 million downloads on Google Play alone. We look into some of the key factors of its success.

While it may not excel at everything yet, AI's prowess in concepting, storyboarding, and ideation has captured the industry's attention. Join us as we delve into the realm of GenAI, exploring its ability to create stunning concept art and assets for games.

In the next five years, almost a third of people will have a headset of some description, and there’ll be about 2.5 billion players. But how do you make the shift to this incredibly lucrative new area? We asked Cloudhead Games.