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11 min read
#Live Ops

10 Rules to Consider When Preparing Your Mobile Game for Localization

Editor’s note: This article has been contributed by Alconost, a global provider of localization services for apps, games and other software into 70+ languages. Alconost also makes advertising and educational videos and images, teasers, explainers, and trailers for Google Play and the App Store. We’ve written this article as a tribute to numerous questions from our clients: What’s wrong with my game? Why isn’t localization enough? How can we fix it? Cutting corners when bootstrapping a new game is a widely-used strategy. And it might even be an efficient one, as long as you aren’t planning to grow incrementally. However, shortly after the long-awaited local release is in the bag, most game developers start thinking about how to attract more international gamers. And sooner or later, after taking a crack at promoting their game in more countries, they come up...
7 min read
#Data & Analytics

A Zeptolab Guide To Soft Launches

The purpose of this post is to share what I would say to myself if I was able to travel back in time to my first day as a product manager starting out in the industry. It reflects what I think is one of the most under-appreciated parts of the work: running effective soft launches. Too many games are ‘dying’ in soft launch. Too many teams don’t fully appreciate how markedly different a soft launch is from ‘regular’ live operations. This is something I personally wish I understood much better at the start of my career. It’s also something I find myself talking about a lot in my current role at Zeptolab Publishing, where I regularly meet with studios around the world.  So if I had a few minutes to prepare my ‘past’ self for the challenge of this industry?...
4 min read
#Data & Analytics

ARPPU in top performing games up 20% compared to 2016

Analysis from Benchmarks+ takes into account several different performance quantiles, including the “superstars” (top 5%, 10%, 15%), and the “standard” quantiles (top 25%, median, bottom 25%). We’ve segmented the analysis in this way to give a broad signal of typical performance bands seen across the industry. Tracking these quantiles also sheds light on historical trends per “band” to give a better sense of how the industry has evolved. Using Benchmarks+, we have analyzed how the main gaming categories and genres have performed for daily ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User), looking at the full year of 2019, and all the way back to 2016. For this analysis, our key focus is the top 5% performance for this metric, which is a good indication of how much “whales” spend in popular titles on any given day. All revenue is IAP based...
13 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Battle Passes: The Latest Hot Trend in Mobile Gaming

Editor’s Note: This is an extended version of an article on the same topic that we published int Pocketgamer.biz, and was originally written by Erno Kiiski, Chief Game Analysts at GameRefinery – US. In his job, he’s played and analyzed hundreds of titles on a feature level, giving him a strong sense of the current western mobile game market. So, without further ado, we’ll let him take the lead.  A bit over a year ago, GameRefinery wrote a post about Battle Pass systems. Back then, this monetization mechanic was still brand-new with Fortnite, the first mobile title to popularize it among players. Even though other genres slowly started adopting the Battle Pass as well, it was mostly left to Battle Royale games. Now the mobile gaming market looks quite different, and you could argue that Battle Pass is here to stay –...
AppFollow Feature Image
4 min read
#Data & Analytics

Most Featured Mobile Games Across the Globe in 2019

3,100 apps appeared on the main page of the App Store in 2019. And 1,465 of them (which is almost 50%) were gaming apps. To help mobile game developers get a better understanding of which gaming apps Apple’s editors gave preference to in 2019, the team at AppFollow has put together an analysis – with the help of their App Store Featured Tool. Let’s get to it. We have analyzed all 1,465 gaming apps which appeared on the App Store main page across the globe between January and December 2019. We have gone over the main App Store tabs, including: App of the Day, Game of the Day, Stories, and Collections.  Stats at a glance: 47% of all apps featured in the Today’s tab are games. Games’ share in the Today’s Collections is 39%, and 48% in Stories.  Action, Adventure,...
8 min read
#Data & Analytics

Three ways to reduce the costs of your HTTP(S) API on AWS

Here at GameAnalytics, we receive, store and process game events from 1.2 billion monthly players in nearly 90,000 games. These events all pass through a system we call the data collection API, which forwards the events to other internal systems so that we eventually end up with statistics and graphs on a dashboard, displaying user activity, game revenue, and more. The data collection API is fairly simple in principle: games send events to us as JSON objects through HTTP POST requests, and we send a short response and take the event from there. Clients either use one of our SDKs or invoke our REST API directly. We get approximately five billion requests per day, each typically containing two or three events for a total of a few kilobytes. The response is a simple HTTP 200 “OK” response with a small...
Screen grab of Wanna Survive
8 min read
#Game Deconstructions

Five Exciting Indie Games Released in November

Despite November being a slower month for new releases, I’ve had my hands full with exciting new games to try out! And despite Apple Arcade launching new titles every month, I’ve turned my attention away from the new service, and back to what you indie developers have been publishing. So as always, I’ve cherry-picked five brilliant games I played last month, and shared exactly why these games caught my eye, and what developers, like you, can learn from them. Let’s get started. 1. Figment Developer: Bedtime Digital Games Launch date: November 28th, 2019 Price: First Chapter is free, then it’s $4.99 to unlock the full game. Available on: iOS, Steam, Switch, Playstation The developers at Bedtime Digital Games have created yet another magical title, again looking like something out of a children’s dreams. This action/adventure game follows the story of...
Ivan at Making Hit Idle Games
6 min read
#Data & Analytics

Hyper-Casual vs Idle: The Latest Trends in Mobile Games   

Back in October, we held our second Making Hit Casual Games event, this time focusing on idle games. As usual, we invited the best minds within this particular genre, and was joined by idle experts Homa Games and Kolibri Games. If you would like to see what expert advice they shared, you can find a copy of their decks and recordings here. But for this post, we’ll be digging into our very own session ‘The Latest Trends for Idle Games”, while seeing how idle particularly compares to the hyper-casual genre. Here’s a copy of the recording, if you’d prefer to watch instead. A bit about our data We featured a heck of a lot of insights in this talk, with aggregated data from over 1.2 billion monthly players, across 80K games from Q3 2018 through to Q2 2019. For this...
3 min read
#Tool & Product

New GameAnalytics User Interface

We’re excited to share a few updates and the latest changes to the GameAnalytics platform. Not only is the brand new version of Remote Configs now available in our tool, but we’ve also released A/B Testing, which you can apply to early access to here. (And for more information on these features, check out our last post here). That being said, this isn’t the biggest update we want to talk about. Alongside creating new features, we’ve also been working on updating the User Interface (UI) for our platform. We haven’t rolled this out for the entire tool, yet, but instead, we’ve applied these new designs to both Remote Configs and A/B Testing to give you a taste of what’s to come. Our new designs will make the tool a heck of a lot easier to navigate, but we appreciate that...
11 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

Launching Mobile Games in China (Tips from JoyPac)

China is already the biggest mobile game market in the world. Over the past few years this market has undergone astonishing growth yet, even so, the sheer potential of this market remains untapped by the majority of Western games developers. With this being said, more studios and publishers need to update their strategy to take this market into account and avoid overlooking a potential goldmine. Be aware, however, that publishing in China comes with a range of challenges unique to the market. To make things easier, many developers and publishers opt to work with local partners (like JoyPac), to help overcome certain pitfalls and gain access to this powerful economy effectively. In the past, working with Chinese-based companies has been a bit of a headache. There are many reasons for this, including cultural and language barriers, as well the more...
Chinese-archero
6 min read
#Data & Analytics

Customizing Your Game for the Chinese Audience

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Arttu Anttonen, Game Analyst. Aside from turning Chinese games inside out, Arttu has a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t in the mobile game market in the East. Everyone working with mobile games in the West already knows Archero. The successful shoot-em-up style ARPG-esque roguelike-ish action game, where players clear sequences of short levels of enemies with their archer hero while avoiding getting shot themselves. And, since many Western game developers struggle with the age-old dilemma of how to make their game more appealing to the Chinese audience, you could be asking yourself: “What would Chinese Archero look like?” Baozou Daxia has been grossing steadily since launch (source: GameRefinery service). Well, a textbook example of how to do it emerged in early September, although made by a Chinese developer, Dream of...
15 min read
#Data & Analytics

Mobile Gaming Industry Analysis for H1 2019

100k titles. 1.2 billion+ MAU. A whole heck of a lot of data. Let's look at the state of the mobile games industry.
10 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

How to Position Your Game to Influencers (Part Two)

In the first part of our guide, we shared a few key tips game developers can use when reaching out to influencers. So, if you’re working on your pitch, or still figuring out which one is best for you, then we recommend you to head to part 1 before reading this one.  For part two of our series, we’re going to give you the lowdown on how to build a (manageable) timeline for your influencer marketing campaigns, no matter what your company’s size or budget is. And just like any other strategy or timeline, this isn’t a “one size fits all” plan. Rather, you can use this as a simple framework to follow when building your own strategy. This is what we will cover: How to estimate how much time you’ll need Pre-campaign planning Production/creative process If you’re beta-testing Post...