HyperCasual is a perplexing genre for many creators of mobile games. When you download a game about Ironing, Coloured Sand or WaterSlides you wouldn’t expect them to be the most popular games on the store, downloaded up to 20 million times in a month.  The simplicity of the titles and the scale of audience is both shocking and inspiring. HyperCasual as a market has grown from strength to strength over the last 3 years and for all the naysayers that the genre has peaked and is now in decline, I say “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

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. 

This is a continuation from last weeks analysis of the Download Charts in 2018, this week we will look at the Top Grossing Charts in 2018.

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.

2018 has been a year of change in mobile. There’s been an entirely new genre emerge in the form of Battle Royale, Hypercasual continued to dominate the free charts, and a large number of prominent publishers had titles slip out of the top 50 grossing (Supercell, King, Playrix). Every year there’s always a lot of talk about the top apps – best in class or award winning designs from Apple and Google. What’s often overlooked are high growth titles that settle into the top 500 but in new or historically weak genres. This often leads to tunnel vision in development with more and more people copying the very best, or jumping on the top genre bandwagon. So this year we partnered with GameRefinery to dissect the landscape as it changes across the four quarters of 2018.

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.

Every app would love to be a trendsetter. Launching a unique game that the world has never seen, designers being inspired by your work. Not many of us will do this within our lifetimes. Mostly, developers are looking to piggyback on a mobile gaming trend look at the market, find a niche, an idea, and then build it into something better. Fortnite built off of the Battle Royale trend, Idle Miner built off the Idle trend and Clash of Clans built off Backyard Monsters.

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!

After our article on why Voodoo was beating indie developers on the app store, we wanted to reach out and uncover how they run such a successful publishing division? Their Publishing Manager Alexander Shea was gracious enough to give us a little more insight into how their processes work.
We’ve been following the trend of Hyper Casual game design and the rise of the core mechanics that are trending on the store. I’ve always been interested in mobile game publishing (having been a mobile game publisher myself for a number of years!) and I still think publishing houses add a lot of value to new and experienced game development studios. I asked some pretty tough questions and Voodoo gave as much insight as they could, but can’t share download or revenue figures with us. Let’s jump into the interview:

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.

Fortnite is a phenomenon. Just like Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto or The Sims, certain games capture the imagination of gamers everywhere and become the defacto standard in where people spend their time. As a free game, growth is faster and more encompassing than paid games. We broke down their Battle Pass Monetization previously, but this week we found out that Epic is not launching the game on the Google Play Store.

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.

When coming up with new game ideas, you often want to look around you for inspiration. Most great games are often a merging of two mechanics with a twist of innovation. I like to use the 90/10 rule. Stick with 90% what you know and try to create a 10% twist. As I mentioned in the Voodoo article, Voodoo doesn’t care about your game design, they care about the market’s perception of your game design. For them whichever game succeeds is how they will grow, but for game developers, history is a valuable teacher and seeing what worked in the past can help in the future.

Here’s a breakdown of the current top 10 game mechanics for hyper casual gaming on the app store and what to remember when building a game using them.

You might also enjoy our follow up article to this, in our Top 7 Idle Game Mechanics article.

Tap / Timing Mechanics

Tap and Timing games are the most popular form of mechanics for hyper casual games. Most of the other mechanics use tapping or timing as an input method for their particular gameplay. In a game that is pure tap and timing gameplay, the mechanic relies upon an exact tap or an exact timing.  Precision is the most important aspect of the action and the focus for the user is perfection.  Only the perfect tap will bring the maximum score. The rest of the games feel and creativity relies on exploiting small inaccuracies in the tap to reduce the player’s ability to win, usually in the form of a high score. The game Baseball Boy by Voodoo focus’ a players attention on a single baseball bat hit as the only action the player has. Every hit is exhilarating, but the perfect hit is dramatically better.

When thinking of tap and timing mechanics you must strip away any external or confusing factors for the player and provide a clear visual objective for a player to achieve. Visual feedback is extremely important here with a clear representation of a bad shot, but also a large positive reinforcement for the Perfect Shot.  The clearer the goal, and the harder the perfect shot, the more fun it is when you hit it.

Stacking Mechanics

Stacking mechanics take the tap/timing mechanic further by adding your previous taps outcome to the progress of the round.  The game The Tower by Ketchapp is a good example where the Tower itself is made up of the previously stacked squares. Every time a player fails to get a perfect stack, the tower itself shrinks, making it harder and smaller for the next stack.

Stacking mechanics provide more points of failure for the players, with each failure having a smaller effect than a Pure Tap game. They soften the failure by allowing you to continue, but they maintain the clear visual clarity of how that failure occurred. The less punishing failure the longer the round, but long rounds also signify a sense of ease.

When thinking how to design with a stack game in mind, make sure players have enough points of failure (5-10) before you end the round, but make sure the difficulty is hard enough that players get non-perfect timings at least 20-40% of the time.  Too few points of failure the game is too hard and too many perfect timings the game is too easy.

Turning Mechanics

Turning is the last of the tap and timing themed mechanics. It adds a further complication to each tap by adding a confusing visual perception. Humans visual cortex has an in built weakness at judging lengths between horizontal and vertical shapes in a 3D space. The visual cortex can be tricked quite easily and many visual illusions demonstrate it, The Ponzo Illusion, is a good example. As a designer you’re still only asking the player to time a single tap but with the added confusion of the 3D space players are more likely to get this wrong. This is much harder to master than the 2D Stack-based approach.

Good turning based gameplay is usually more forgiving than stack-based gameplay, resetting the player more frequently and letting them get back into a perfect streak even after making mistakes. As a designer you want your players to make clear mistakes that end in failure, the more obvious those mistakes the less frustrated a player becomes. Turning games also work best when the angles are 90 degrees or repeating sharp angles, simply because the brain can learn to overcome it’s own weakness, through trial and error! You must be more lenient than other hypercasual game mechanics because people simply don’t believe their own eyes! Oh the power of the mind 👀

Dexterity Mechanics

These games mainly focus on a player having a very simple and repeating action that they must perform many hundreds of times. With enough practice, these mechanics can be mastered by dextrous players and so the highest score is a fair representation of dexterity and skill.  For these games to be fun the game must usually speed up, taking a mechanic that might be easy to slowly, but when pressurised by a time becomes more and more likely you will make a mistake.

You still need a clear hard limit to success usually a single life or single mistake ends the round and you start from the beginning. Timberman by Digital Melody is a great example of taking a player’s full attention, timing and dexterity to create a challenging points based challenge.  When designing these sort of games you must make sure the controls and input sensitivity is the highest priority. There can be no lag and no grey areas, a players action will directly affect the character immediately. A player will be inputting many hundreds of taps per round, each tap must be accurate for it to be fun, any inaccuracies or lag are multiplied by the number of times you input it.

Rising / Falling Mechanics 

——

Rising and falling mechanics provide interesting journeys for their players. The constant progression of the level leads to the feeling of progression without a change in the mechanic or goal. To keep people entertained the level itself must develop. Rise Up by Serkan Özyılmaz and Helix Jump by Voodoo show how progression develops as you traverse up or down the game.

The player’s focus is on dealing with the next challenge along the progression and less about accuracy.  There are many ways to win these levels, a little luck is often needed over timing or skill. Your only goal is to protect an object from a single point of failure.

The journey develops pressurising environments and the players end up  creating lots of self-inflicted problems. Small issues early on can cause much harder moves later. Good design here focus’ on players have 1 or possibly 2 problems to deal with at a time, but the nature of the problem changes as you rise or fall through the gameplay. Try to think in stages and work on each stage being fun on it’s own, adding them together creates the dynamic journey.

Swerve Mechanics

The final arcade based hypercasual mechanic is the swerve mechanic.  These games focus on using the drag of a finger to avoid obstacles. Most of the time they are avoidance based mechanics in a similar vein to rising and falling, but they also focus more on dexterity than timing. Swerve games maximise the touch screen controls and are hard to recreate on other devices. This gives them an original feeling and a cool use of touch inputs.

What’s important here is that the game focus’ on a player accuracy of input from dragging and sweeping a finger, rather than timing a tap. The size of the object, the speed of the object has a big effect on what people are able to do with their fingers.

In the same way, as dextrous games focus on removing inaccuracies, swerve games need to focus on the input feel of your finger. Players will play for longer if the game feels fun and the near misses feel, super near. Work on making the game reward players for near misses and replay their errors to show just how close they were to almost avoiding death to make the game more fun.

Merging Mechanics

Merging mechanics are very easy for players to understand. Similar things combine, different things don’t. The game then becomes very easy for people to get right and with each subsequent merge, a new piece of understanding and a strong sense of progression is conveyed to players. Complexity and challenge in this game usually come in the form of a metagame, something that non-casual games rely on, but for the casual audience, the metagame can be divisive, making the game too complex and turning people away from playing.

Merge games do well because the metagame is incorporated into the main game. The mechanic is very visual and you can see how your action is causing the merged units to be different from one another. For a merging game to be successful, don’t break the golden rule, embrace the golden rule – Similar things combine, different things don’t. You then need to make merging feel fun, animate, excite and surprise players with each new find. The clear sense of progression along with the ever-increasing challenge,  due to exponential growth, of merging to the next stage will keep people playing for longer.

Idle Mechanics

Idle as a mechanic has been used in hyper casual to mid-core games for a number of years. The complexity and reliance on the mechanic is a choice by each game designer. At its core, it is any mechanic that doesn’t require input from a player in order to progress. Obviously, no input at all is a very casual experience, but also one that without an objective becomes boring. Most of the time idle mechanics form a secondary mechanic attached to a soft currency.  This works well because over time players earn more money which they can spend in their core game experience.

Adventure Capitalist by Hyper Hippo made the idle mechanic the core focus of the gameplay and built a game around repeating the mechanic with different growth rates. It became successful because of the interplay between the rates and the addition of ascension mechanics which force a player to lose all of their progress in the current game for increase speed of progress in the next game.

For idle mechanics to be fun, they need to be balanced. The biggest issue with the genre is bad maths. Either the game reaches incredibly hard to overcome peaks of progress or totally boring plateaus of progression where the numbers and growth mean nothing in the real game.  Be careful and make sure you use your excel skills to their max if you want to rely on idle mechanics.

Growing Mechanics

Growing mechanics are very similar to idle mechanics in that they are usually independent of the core control input but do form the core gameplay objective. Winners in this hyper casual genre are always the largest and in some cases can eat other players, in essence ending a round.  The gameplay mechanics themselves are very clear, yet developing a fun experience and one that scales is reasonably difficult for this genre.

You need to think a lot about player density when designing games that grow. Obviously, all players want to grow, but not all can. Starting the correct number of players in the correct space and with the correct amount of food is what makes this genre fun. These games also become exponentially more fun with other real people playing them and have so far formed the .io genre on the store. The number of fitting gameplay mechanics for this genre is limited but the games have a longer lifespan than other hypercasual games because of the interactions with other players.

Puzzle Mechanics

Puzzle is a genre in itself, but hyper casual puzzle games focus on simplicity rather than complexity. A good hyper casual puzzle game usually has no end. Players are simply asked to continue to play the puzzle for as long as possible and the game will not increase the difficulty.  The mechanic itself must grow in complexity via the users’ actions. Good examples are 1010! By Gram Games or 2048 by Ketchapp. In both cases, the puzzle rules are set at the beginning and the board develops as you play. Unlike other board games such as Chess or Chequers which have clear end goals, hypercasual puzzle games usually have no clear end and it’s simply a case of lasting as long as you can.

These are the hardest genre of hypercasual games to develop because they are usually very clear and defined mechanics that are unique to the game itself. This is because it is very hard to create a mechanic that over time doesn’t change the gameboard into something that is too easy or too hard. Board Games are usually a great place to look for tried and tested mechanics, but make sure you chose ones that require very few rules otherwise you will lose your audience in the explanation.

Please share in the comments if you feel there are any other hyper casual game mechanics worth mentioning or any other hyper casual games ideas that you like and we’ll update the article!

Mobile gaming has shifted, again. The hypercasual genre has begun to dominate the free app charts. In 2017 Ketchapp (now owned by Ubisoft) started a revolution of simplicity in game design with mobile titles such as Tower or Ballz. The games focused on clear visuals and simple mechanics and very light progression systems.  They also importantly removed IAP as the core monetization and replaced it with Advertising revenue. The games were so simple and casual that anyone could understand them in under 10 seconds. Since then, there has been a proliferation of publishers, studios, and solo indie developers each working on similar casual titles. Space is highly competitive, but there is a clear king of the app store, Voodoo, recently receiving $200 million from Goldman Sachs.

Reviewing the estimated data on Sensor Tower for June in the Top 100 US Free Game charts, Voodoo accounted for 24.7%* of all the free downloads. Broadening the view to all Hypercasual games, approximately 57% of all free game downloads can be attributed to this space.**  

Number of games in the Top 100 Free Games US Chart - June 2018

Publisher	Number of Games
Voodoo	18***
Playgendry	3
Tastypill	3
Lion Studios	3
Ketchapp	2

*Data taken from Sensor Tower estimated US game downloads from June 2018
**Data taken from Sensor Tower estimated US game download from June 2018 and assessing the apps mechanics and monetization stream
***Rock of Destruction, Stone Skimming, Dune, Twenty48 Solitaire, Fight List, Paper.io, Twisty Road, Splashy, Waves, The Cube – What’s Inside, Flying Arrow, Stack Jump, Rolly Vortex, Baseball Boy, The Fish Master, Snake VS Block, Color Road, Helix Jump, Hole.io

Of all the genres of games released on the app store, no other genre commands the pure number of downloads that Hypercasual games do.  The simplicity of the gameplay, coupled with the speed of gamers learning and mastering the challenge creates a voracious need to download the next new idea, older games are quickly discarded or deleted. This has not escaped the notice of many game developers with hundreds of studios trying to build the next mega hit. However, Voodoo has truly mastered both the sourcing and promotion of their titles making it tough for studios to compete. How has Voodoo dominated the Hypercasual space?

#1 Game Design doesn’t matter

Voodoo doesn’t care about your game’s design. Voodoo cares about your game’s market potential. As a publishing house, the majority of their releases can clearly be seen as “inspired by” reproductions of older games.

• Tiny Wings – Dune
• Donut County – Hole.io
• slither.io – paper.io

In each case, success is not down to the game mechanics or technical quality of the product, but Voodoo’s ability to market games more effectively and reach a larger audience than those original games. Bad game design still won’t make the cut, but innovative game design is not as important as tried and tested successful mechanics. If you want help with your hyper casual game design we wrote a post of the Top 10 Hyper Casual game mechanics present today.

This is very hard for the average game developer to swallow and it’s hard to think that game design is the least important aspect to Voodoo’s success. What set’s voodoo apart is their ability to work with a large number of talented studios each working on simple, tested, game designs, and then apply industry-leading marketing and growth practices to push games to the top of the App Store. Dictating which game design is the most popular is something the market decides, not something Voodoo strives to set.

#2 Voodoo releases games faster than you

Making rough approximations through tracking the releases of the majority of HyperCasual publishers on both Google Play and Apple App Store, Voodoo have released 7 new titles that reached top 300 in the US Free in the last 30 days. Most of the other publishers have released between 0 and 2. This is a phenomenal pace compared with classical studios or even publishers who might schedule 1 or 2 apps per month in order to give it the support needed. This highlights a fundamental shift in business practices.

Most developers’ first start to iterate, test and soft launch titles in cheaper CPI countries such as the Philippines or New Zealand. Based on the feedback they got back from players, designers and developers optimize and iterate the FTUE or monetization balance to slowly improve the LTV and retention.  When a studio is confident in their polished products, they would approach Apple and Google to showcase their app and hope for a feature. At the same time, they might allocate a large marketing budget and test multiple ad variants in order to be confident in having the largest splash possible. This is too slow for hypercasual, this is not the way Voodoo approach app releases.

Voodoo may have 100-200 development studios each working frantically on new game designs.  In each case, the focus is the core gameplay. The meta and even the advertising is left out for the initial soft launch release. Core loops are then tested without fanfare into key territories such as the US or China in order to see if there are good responses to the mechanic. Voodoo released a simple guide for their gameplay style (Snackable, Youtubable, Straight forward, Not punitive, Innovative) which clearly restricts multiple game designs from the table.

Games are then measured on a brutally tough scale. Each game needs 50%+ D1 retention to even make the cut.  This creates a very competitive environment where stats and data become the key to becoming picked up by these top publishers.  As a developer you want to know that your game can actually reach a large audience, this is where Voodoo has developer a lot of skills.

#3 Voodoo grows games cheaply

In a system where CPIs are low, games can grow fast. If you’re able to spend $1 and make $1.50 back then you should just keep spending more money and grow faster.  This relationship is often quoted as LTV > CPI (check out the bible for more details).

Different genres of free to play mobile games have different monetization profiles and can roughly be categorised by their mechanics or via their audience.  Games with the highest monetization profiles (i.e Casino games) are able to spend $50+ per user because the LTV of their titles is very high. However, their audience is usually quite small.

IAP based monetization models focus on generating the most revenue per user but in doing so their audience becomes harder to find. Hypercasual as a genre works so well because they can lower the CPI to incredibly low levels through clear advertising creative and data-driven programmatic marketing. However, without clear IAPs or items or gacha systems, the model relies on users watching and engaging with advertising. Getting the balance between a very low CPI while maximising the Advertising yield is where the profit is.

#4 Voodoo have better relationships than you

As a developer, you must tread a fine line between showing as many ads as possible (that result in an install) while not breaking the user’s enjoyment of the game. Getting the right ads presented at the right time results in much higher eCPMs.

Because of this, many genres of game perform better than others simply because they create natural breaks in the gameplay where an ad can be shown without disturbing a users playtime.  The better the app is at retaining players through its core loop the more opportunities there are to show ads and therefore the higher the LTV. But this isn’t the only piece of the puzzle. You must show the highest performing ad to the right user in order to efficiently display ads that will result in installs.  

Voodoo is in a better position to maximise this than other studios. Due to their immense size and scale, they have more relationships at better rates than your average development studio.  This means the ads they show are more likely to result in higher paying installs, increasing the LTV further.  The mobile ad networks are ruthless and competitive: everyone wants to work with the largest player. When considering the Hypercasual segment as a business strategy you must take the business development time into account.

#5 Voodoo can scale games into profitable cash cows.

For larger businesses, opportunities must provide enough profit for them to seem interesting. I would say that any game that can drive $10,000 a day in gross revenue is enough to support a smaller gaming studio. Many studios don’t think about making games in terms of gross profit and they often neglect to think about the number of users necessary in order to make that magic $10,000 per day.  

Hypercasual games tend to make lower revenue per DAU. A typical game will be anywhere between $0.01-0.10. Along with their large network of titles Voodoo also has a large volume of data on who their most active players are. Using in-game events to look into player actions, helps you to know clearly which players are playing your games the most. The larger the Voodoo game network becomes the more refined the company can segment or target individual players with effective marketing messages.

As they expand into new genres and different players engage, further refinements in their voice or creative might work better for individual game types. By doing hyper-specific segmentation you can get lower CPIs and more ad views.

What becomes hard for developers is to perform this correctly and at scale. This requires a team of people to analyse, review, create and then execute effective marketing. Voodoo has learnt how to do this very well.

Competing against Voodoo

The biggest mistake most game developers make when attempting to attack the hypercasual gaming market is to think they can innovate through game design. Voodoo has proven that innovation in game mechanics is not as important as cheap and effective marketing. Their pace of release and the scale of their network is growing all the time allowing them to learn and understand their users more and more. To have a viable shot at competing you must be prepared to invest heavily in a strong data warehouse, a talented marketing team and use metrics and data to decide which games have the strongest business case.

Even though this seems like an impossible task, strong-willed and talented studios can carve out their own niche. Find a mechanic that you know well and has strong retention metrics, then work on expanding or perfecting the metagame. Be careful to keep the mechanics pure and simple or you will lose what makes hypercasual special. You must also be ruthless with your game designs and drop anything that doesn’t make the cut, be quick, be bold and follow the low CPIs. Studios like Playgendary, Lion and Super TapX show that it can be done.

The latest Clan Wars update dropped for Clash Royale this month adding a new competitive mode that pits clan vs clan in a 2 day competitive event.  Clash Royale, the poster child of innovative mobile battle arena gameplay has been losing engagement and viewer across YouTube and other streaming platforms. In fact, Clash Royale’s quarterly revenues are around a half of what they were just a year ago.  The games industry is a fickle place where gamers quickly switch between titles to play whatever is hottest at the time. Clan Wars is Supercell’s attempt to lure loyal fans back and give them a new reason to play the game?

Clan Wars – What is it?

A clan war is split into two phases. The first is a 24h period called “collection” in which each clan member has the ability to play 2-3 different match types against a random selection of players.  These match types will be familiar to anyone who has been following Clash Royale for the past year or so in that they mirror the common challenges that are sometimes used for events. So far I’ve seen, double elixir, draft and 2v2 and in each case you can pick from your own cards or draft although they use Tournament level stats.  If you win your match you win a Clan Chest that opens into a central “clan deck” of cards that the clan can then level up and use to build a deck for Battle Day. The more players that compete in the collection phase the better the card selection and the higher levelled the cards.

The second day is called Battle Day and now players may only select from the cards they have won at the level that each card is currently levelled up to.  This creates a tactical discussion session where deck crafting from the cards that have dropped can be aided by the clan themselves. You only have one chance to succeed, with each clan member having a single battle.  If they win, they add a sword to their leaderboard and of the 5 competing clan, one clan will be the overall winner and gets a larger chest. Each clan war lasts around 2 days.

Clan Wars – Why do it?

Clash Royale is a mature product and with it there is a mature audience. Most of the players with over 3000 crowns or more will have been playing Clash Royale for 1 or more years. They will probably have somewhere between 80-100% of the cards unlocked and will be grinding the top levels of those cards. This can take months per card. At this point there is a large amount of player fatigue and moving people from new or different challenge keep people entertained. As I spoke about in my GDC talk a game team wants to establish a Lord of the Rings Metric (one KPI to rule them all). An update at this stage should focus on driving the most interaction with that metric as by improving this all other metrics will tend to trend upwards. For Clash Royale I would argue it is Battles per DAU which leads to more engagement in all their other systems, spenders will most likely have a high battle count.

As well as trying to improve your internal KPIs, the mobile marketing is a constantly changing battleground. External factors can have huge effects on your games bottom line and although unpredictable the one thing you do know is that changes will happen.  Just before this update released – Fornites launch has disrupted and captured 80-90% of the market share relative to the previously steady state.

Problems it could solve

Clash Royale is a fantastic mobile game. It creates subtle depth in it’s characters along complex strategic decisions which requiring a low number of active touch inputs but precise timing. This is what makes it so playable on mobile.  However when a game is designed to for many years there are often issues that long term players get stuck in that are not apparent in the short or mid term. Clans Wars has the potential to alleviate some of the more complex issues that most long term players of the game might be familiar with these are:

1. The Archetype Problem
2. The Yoyo Effect
3. Clan Engagement

1. The Archetype Problem

In all competitive games balance becomes one of the major discussion areas for players. Balance issues usually involve overpowers stats of a single gameplay element, a broken combination of 2 or more elements or a game-breaking unforseen bug when using the element.  In each case the collective of gamers dissect and discuss how to gain micro-competitive advantages with their setups – we call this the metagame (the game outside of the game).

An Archetype is usually a combination of cards that all work well together and therefore commonly get picked and combined together.  They are the most powerful implementation of cards and so by using them you are more likely to beat your opponent. Some decks that a Clash Royale player might recognise would be Lavaloon, Mortar-Hog, Bridgespam etc. When you’re a new player you strive to be able to make certain decks that contain legendary cards that you might not own and this drives you to engage more fully.  In each case the decks usually feature 6 core cards and then rotate 2 cards depending on the players taste. However from a long term players perspective, the issue is the boredom of playing the same archetype again and again.  

The challenge for the designer is to provide enough viable archetypes that during a play session of 10 or more rounds you are unlikely to meet the same deck. Currently in Clash Royale I would argue this is not the case, there are around 5-10 common archetypes and at the top end of the game, you see these decks almost every round. This is not an issue only for Clash Royale, but all online PvP games feature this to some extent.

Providing interesting tools to the community to enable quick counters and evolving strategies. This common archetype problem is exacerbated in Clash Royale because of the very short game sessions, meaning you encounter more decks in the same period of time. The Archetype problem isn’t a direct gameplay issue because it provides interesting content for players to talk about, this is one of the reasons why Clash Royale has been so popular on YouTube and Twitch. However, without enough variety in rulesets you can grind yourself out of enjoying the experience.

2. The YoYo Effect

Any person who plays competitive 1 on 1 games will know the YoYo effect. When placed in a competitive ladder where your opponents are matched by a ranking formula, such as ELO, the YoYo effect occurs. You yoyo between a high and low point on the ladder as you win one, lose one in a repeating sequence. In my case I can’t break the 4000 cap and I yoyo between 3600-4000.  This becomes immensely frustrating as no matter what I do I can’t maintain my progress. It also means that if I am at 4000 trophies I don’t want to play more as I fear a loss more than I want a win.

Levelling up a single card has no real difference to your position post 3000 trophies and so rank becomes a measure of skill. If this we’re the only mode in Clash Royale it is likely that I would have churned out a long time ago, but what kept me in was the events. Events applied new rules, new deck combinations and restrictions on the gameplay. This often levelled the playing field. The challenge was then to try to beat 12 individuals in a row with only 3 lives. This removes yoyoing entirely as now it’s simply a challenge to continue your winning streak. A new event happened every week and each week it would engage me to compete.  I personally drifted from the ladder climbing and focussed on perfecting the events with 2 or 3 that I got all 12 wins. Clan Wars could provide a more detailed structure for events, and pit not just player vs player, but clan vs clan in a clan winning streak.

3. Clan Engagement

I would estimate a very large proportion of players in clash royale are in a clan. The clan provides a group of people who share your passion and you can talk tactics and share replays. The most used feature within the clan would be the Clan requests where you can ask for cards from your clanmates. Within this interface currently there is a large stagnation of content. In my clan I would say there is a core of 8-10 people that actively chat or engage in conversations and discussion, with the majority of people including myself who simply make card request.

The more active and engaged a community the more likely they are to stick, spend and promote your game to their friends. From a long tail perspective providing engagement, challenge and motivation to these players is what sustains longer term revenues. However, without an evolving or changing metagame, a variety of weekly challenges or a global event the clan chat can become dull and boring. I feel that the clan structure within Clash Royale provides all the tools adequate to really helping people to share and strategise but I felt the strategy of the game had tailed off due to the archetype problem in recent months.

Clan Wars – The Update

Let’s think about each of the problems above and how the update attempted to solve them. Whether it was a success or how it could be improved.

1. Archetype Solution

Clan Wars made a valiant attempt to remove the archetype problem from the discussion. As the war is split into a collection day vs a battle day.  The collection day is an ability for players to find cards and then level them up for the clan. This is a beautiful solution as it tries to solve the Archetype problem in 3 ways

Firstly, it adds chance of which cards you find. You no longer have a reliable card collection, each Clan War forces you to look at the cards your clan has found and create a well rounded deck.

Secondly the cards you do find level up depending on the number of wins. This creates a wider range of stats with which to vary your deck playing abilities. The decision to take Goblin Barrel level 3 or Knight level 11 can affect your decks build.  

Finally your opponents are doing the same collection phase. This creates a more asymmetrical hidden information that means your deck cannot be built to easily counter.

Each of these 3 factors mean that wilder and less common card combinations are used and sometimes picking the most OP card in your collection (level 12 Barbarians) can truly beat opponents through sheer power. This plays out quite well as each clan war my clan has played a much wider range of decks.

Going Further

I think the solution doesn’t go far enough.  It should be tweaked to put even more pressure on the harvesting day and provide more depth in the War day for clans to strategise. Currently the number of cards dropped and number of level ups needed is the same as the main game. There is no reason to use these numbers apart from familiarity and in this particular game mode you never get enough cards to even see level 11. I would actually adjust the balance of the common and rare drops to provide even more “going for it” level ups, making the choice not just on strategy but stats as well.

Currently a player gets 2 attacks in order to earn cards and then their collecting abilities are capped. It would be more interesting if players had a number of lives in collection day, rather than a number of battles. This means that any player could earn exponentially more cards if their skills was high.  In order to limit players who are very skilled at the game the more wins you get the more levelled up an opponent’s King towers could becoming. In a way handicapping the victor.  This would then provide a range between 3-10 matches for each player depending on their skill.

The Clan War battle is also a single battle against a random opponent. In some cases you may have 2 battles, but this is only when the clan sizes are mismatched and you are on the lower tiered clan. You and your clan have no way to discuss or tweak your plays, based on learning from previous battles. It’s an all or nothing affair where winner takes all. What if the clan was given secret information or could earn the rights to see the opponents War Deck by winning challenges. By understanding the cards available for opponents you could again strategise more particularly on your clans deck crafting.

2. Yoyo Solution

Clan Wars does provide an alternative challenge to the ladder. It’s one more thing to do and I believe it would improve the total number of battles each user takes part in each week. However the ladder problem still exists in the single player game. For Clan Wars to be a truly successful update is should actually try to create a larger inter-clan ladder that all clans compete on worldwide ensuring that your personal ladder is of less important than your clans ladder position and you spend more time perfecting your skills for the Clan War.

At the moment this doesn’t feel the case as we’re still establishing clan win rates. However, I dont see a clear display of the Clan Wars leaderboard and no prestige is provided for those who are ontop. This means that overtime the wars fought will become less meaningful and apathy towards the wars might continue. Clan War leagues might be a better solution here, read the C.A.T.S review to understand the promotion and demotion for players and how it drives engagement.

3. Clan Engagement Solution

There is certainly more clan activity since the update. More communication, more replay sharing and an increased discussion about the game itself.  We’ve seen more clan leaders send messages to the group to get people involved and the social dynamics it creates are important. I also was personally congratulated for winning my particular fights in the war and that felt good. People within the group are responding and pushing each other to perform at their best and this is very healthy for the game in general.

Another suggestion here is that rather than creating multiple decks per clan for each war, the clans should craft a single war deck that all clan members would fight with. Clan members could each submit their own deck creations along with a name, and the top picks could be voted on for the war.  You could then imagine clan discussions recounting previous wars and how certain clan mates created crazy but powerful combinations that helped the clan succeed. You would also face the same deck with your opponents and therefore clan members could coach you through each war day.

War Day

For me the actual weakest aspect of Clan Wars is war day itself.  The collection mechanics and the strategic clan chats have geared you up for an epic battle against 5 other clans. However, what actually occurs is a single match against a random opponent.  Once you’ve played this round, the war is over.

The fact that the decks you spent so long collecting and crafting are only used in a single match. War Day feel more like a game of chance rather than skill. I felt this acutely on my first war when I won quickly because I was matched with a poor opponent.  It had built up, to a single battle that was a poor experience even though I had won and then I was left waiting for the next war.

The war could be expanded with a clan tournament.  Taking 8 clans and facing them in a 3 tier round robin tournament where if your clan wins you would obtain even more cards, dynamically shifting your war deck.  A clan would then spend 1 day collecting and 3 days battling to become the ultimate clan of the 8. Also rather than a single battle, each player should have 3 fights with opposing teams giving a bigger range for skill. The further a clan progressed the more involved in chat and strategy they would become. The Archetype issue would actually become a strategic point of discussion as you played more battles you could feedback to clan mates to let them know the opponent is like to drop a pekka. by giving the clan more and more to think about as results pour in.

Conclusion

Clan Wars is a well designed update aimed at solving some of the more complex design issues that occur in older free to play titles. It’s a great solution at solving the Archetype issue that is very apparent in the core game. We’ve also see that it provides some remedy to both the YoYo problem and clan engagement but these are likely to be short term fixes. My largest criticism is that the collecting mechanic and “Going for it” feeling are both underutilised and less important that simply turning up and having your battle with any deck. The clan as a whole feels united during collection day and disjointed in war day. I believe the team should go further to create memorable clan wars that are talked about for weeks or months after the event. Players who create the war deck that win wars will feel proud and acknowledged by the clan and could go down in clan history.  For me this is the weakness with the current Clan Wars update. It’s provided a new game mode that creates a dynamic and interesting deck building environment, but it doesn’t create memorable clan battle or stories. Each clan war fades quickly into the background and the next war takes its place. The more planning, strategy and interaction the clan takes in each war, the stronger the emotional connection will be towards the event and this is what will make players stick for the longer term.

It’s been a month since GDC 2018 and if you visited San Fransisco and perhaps even saw my talk live, thank you! If like most people you missed it, here are the slides and link to the GDC Vault:

Shoestring Soft Launch GDC Vault

The talk focuses on being a practical guide to preparing, running and analysing your games soft launch.  Whatever the size and scale of your studio I consider a soft launch critical in the process of creating a successful product on the store.  There have been so many different methods to soft launch and so much confusion that I tried to sum it up in a guide.  The guide keeps it simple and light and focus’ on the maximum bang for $2000 of spend.  A big focus is the idea of bursting a soft launch rather than running an always on campaign, this can save you money and keep your team focused on development rather than watching your numbers all the time. The bigger your studio the more refined your marketing and soft launch tactics might be, but hopefully there is something in there for everyone!

Outline

1. Definition of a Soft Launch
   1. What?
   2. When?
   3. Why?
2. Before you Soft Launch
   1. AARRR + GQM Data design
   2. KPI / Dashboard Setup
   3. Audience and Location choosing
3. Running a Soft Launch
   1. Bursting
   2. Analysing
   3. Critical Decisions