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.

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.

The idle game genre has been heating up quickly on mobile. What was once a small indie niche has been expanding rapidly over the last years. So how do you, as a developer, take advantage of this trend? How can you create the next idle game idea that will dominate the market?

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.

Happy New Year! In amongst all the disregarded party poppers, half drunk glasses of Prosecco, and trays loaded with fast drying out canapés, we can confidently report it is indeed 2018. To start the new year off on the right foot, we’ve decided to come proffering gifts: namely, a new Free to Play Bible, building on its existing foundations to offer both upcoming and established mobile developers the resources

You may have missed it. Over the easter long weekend, starting on April 14th, a new contender took the #1 Top Grossing spot in the United States: Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle. Moving aside games like Pokemon Go, Clash Royale and Game of War from their usual top spots.

Video ad revenue now accounts for a large proportion of most casual free to play mobile games. Companies like Hipster Whale, Futureplay and the publisher Ketchapp have built business models focussed on rewarded video ads. This shows many of the similarities of the shift from premium to freemium. As an indie developer it’s relatively simple to drop a video ad into your game, but do you understand where the money comes from? In this piece we breakdown how the flow of money gets from the advertiser to your bank account.

As promised, here are the slides from my talk at GDC 2017 on Evaluating Monetization Early.

In my previous post Understanding Energy I explained the reasons that designers include energy systems in their games: