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:
The number of games in each sub-genre
The rank of each game
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.
The Top Free Mobile Game Genres of 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.
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.
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:
The number of games in each sub-genre
The rank of each game
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.
