https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Fcrcx1JodaQgz3lNePELA?si=Fn6AxYZFRciLVcO03rq5gQ Hey, another podcast this week. I had the pleasure of joining Joseph Kim and Eric Kress on another edition of "TWIG" (This week in games"). This week we focused on Epic's PC Store expansion with

Had the privilege of joining "TWIG" (This Week in Games) - a podcast by Miska Katkoff, Joseph Kim, and Eric Kress talking about the latest trends in Games. Check here for a listen:

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?

When freemium games started being successful in the late 2000s, the industry began to search for new job roles. Roles that are focussed on understanding data on in-game player behavior. New jobs like business performance manager, data scientist, data analyst and business intelligence manager were created. Initially, there were no tools and standards, but as the industry matured, so did the practices. Now there is a relatively standardized understanding of what it means to be a producer versus a business performance manager versus a data scientist, as well as what good use of in-game data looks like.

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.

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:

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.