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10 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Improving F2P mobile games with subscription

Subscription as a revenue model is a relatively new concept to the consumer world, but definitely not unheard of. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, Tinder, Deliveroo and even Duolingo, there are many different services out there that adopted this in the last decade, and it’s just growing. But how about in gaming? More specifically, mobile gaming? How can you really implement a subscription service and increase your revenue, without disrupting your existing revenue streams? We answer just that. The New Era of Monetization When the first iPhone launched in 2007, ‘premium’ was the dominant business model for mobile games. And by 2009, everyone was publishing $1 games such as ‘Angry Birds’, ‘Doodle Jump’, and ‘Cut the Rope’… With any new piece of technology, things started to develop fairly fast,  and soon Free-to-Play was introduced. By 2011, more than half of all...
9 min read
#Data & Analytics

Early Testing Strategies to Maximize Your Hyper-Casual Game’s Potential

Editors note: This article was written by Vivian Dong, Senior Publishing Manager at JoyPac. This is based on their most recent webinar, which you can watch here. Testing is the most important part in the whole process of hyper-casual game development. When you have an exciting new game idea, you need to quickly answer the most fundamental questions: Will your idea be appealing enough to draw in players? When they download and play it, will they keep playing it? Will it make money? To answer these questions, you’ll need to start testing as early as possible. We recently hosted a webinar on early testing, along with Gabriel Stürmer, CEO at Clap Clap Games, and Kristina Truvaleva of Business Development & Global Partnerships at ZeptoLab. Here are ten lessons we took away from the webinar. Lesson 1: Test your idea’s marketability...
2 min read
#Tool & Product

Supporting BAME game dev teams with industry insights

A few days ago, we issued a statement mentioning that we are willing to do our part to support the black community, as well as other ethnic minorities. Since then, we’ve been discussing ways to do this, not just now in the short term, but on an ongoing basis. We are a small company, but something we do have plenty of is data and insights. We also have a wonderful community of talented indie game developers from around the world, who are working very hard to get their first hit. Knowing which mechanics, genre, or publisher to pick can make a massive difference in a prototype’s success, and insights are essential to that decision process. We put two and two together and we’ve decided to offer up to 12 months free access to our premium insights service, Benchmarks+, for indie...
6 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

Gamer psychology and the 4 types of rewarded video users

This article was originally written by Or Shahar, General Manager U.S. at ironSource. You can find their version on the Level Up blog, and Game Daily. Successful games must satisfy a wide range of users, each with diverse values, needs and desires. To speak to all audiences, developers often design gameplay according to psychological factors, grouping players according to behavioral or emotional commonalities. After grouping these players according to commonalities for game design and mechanics, developers can also apply the same logic to ad monetization features like rewarded video, which functions as an integral part of the gameplay. In contrast to ad units that can’t be integrated as a core feature and don’t allow for much optimization beyond timing and frequency, rewarded video, when properly implemented, offers developers a wider variety of optimization options for their monetization strategy. In addition,...
Best tools for game dev
13 min read
#Strategies

Time-Saving Tools For Mobile Game Developers

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in 2016. As it’s been a while since we’ve explored what the best tools are that you should be using, we thought we would go ahead and give this post a refresh. Let us know if you think we’ve missed anything important.  How can you lower acquisition costs, improve engagement and drive more purchases? Where will you find the time? From basement to studio, game developers manage a growing remit of technical skills… yet the hours in a day stay fixed. For sure, there are thousands of time-saving apps and services that you can make use of – but figuring out which are best is tricky. That’s why we’ve curated a list of the top game development tools, as voted for by game developers, to help steer you in the right direction and free-up your time to...
12 min read
#Game Design

How to Crack the Match 3 Code? – Part 1

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Om Tandon, Founder/Games Consultant at UX Reviewer.com. You can find the original version of this post here. Since the early days of app store gaming, Match 3 games have been consistently one of the most popular top-grossing casual games category (Candy Crush Saga launched in 2012 being a classic example genre’s long reign). Reasons for this genre’s mass popularity with players have traditionally included: Simplified core loop with low barrier to entry for new players and first-time gamers Game mechanics leveraging mobile-first, intuitive touch gestures on smart devices like tap, swipe which even children can figure out (literally) Relatively less player effort & user friction via low strategy puzzle core loop. Short gameplay sessions with low time commitment making these games effortlessly easy to pick and drop on the go. You can successfully play a session in a...
8 min read
#Game Design

So you want to make an RPG game? Here’s what you should know

The RPG genre has changed dramatically over the past few years. Going from pen and paper to tabletops, from desktop to mobile, the genre barely looks the same as it did all those years ago. Despite this, there are a few elements that hold true in them all. And in this post, my goal is to highlight what those elements are, how they work, and what you need to remember when making a hit RPG game. There are four main sections you can check out, so feel free to skip to something in specific: Audience Get your pacing right Smaller experiences Customization Let’s get started. So, who the hell plays RPG games? As you’ll probably know, audiences don’t just slip into one neat demographic. There are a ton of reasons why someone would play your game. If you look at...
13 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Personalizing Offers for In-App Monetization – Lessons from Crazy Panda

At Crazy Panda we publish loads of different types of titles – like World Poker Club (the biggest poker game in the Commonwealth of Independent States), Stellar Age (a mid-core mobile MMO strategy game) and Household (a social networks-based farm game). These games might look pretty different, but they all have one thing in common – in-app purchases monetization, and personalized offers. In fact, at Crazy Panda, personalized offers are between 50% and 80% of our revenue, depending on the product. So we’ve spent a lot of time making sure we get these right. And we’d like to pass on a bit of what we’ve learned to you. We think you can use this for most, if not all, games with in-app monetization. Before we begin Let’s start by nailing down a few technical terms which you may or may...
3 min read
#Game Design

How Voodoo Diversified and Lowered Game Product KPIs

Editors Notes: This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Youssef Gasmi, Communications Manager at Voodoo.  Measurability of value has become a key factor in game publishing, a set of metrics that define what games get made, and which concepts are invested in. Successfully understanding the core strengths and the impact a game will have before it is released is a vital part of the development process in mobile games. This is becoming more important due to the highly competitive nature of the market in 2020. As result, what were once seen as hard and fast rules, namely 55% D1, 22% D7 retention and CPIs below $0.25 are now considered short-sighted. At Voodoo, we have become the leading publisher behind Hyper-Casual games, and we have used a robust testing methodology to establish a game’s retention, and cost per install values,...
7 min read
#Data & Analytics

How to find Hyper-Casual Success with Rapid Testing and Development

Editors note: This blog was written by hyper-casual specialists, JoyPac. JoyPac specializes in publishing hit hyper-casual games across the globe, and today they have agreed to share their insights into testing and developing hyper-casual games.  On Wednesday, May 13th, we’ll be hosting a JoyPac webinar all about making successful hyper-casual games using rapid testing and development. This blog is your preview for the topics we’ll be discussing and some of the advice we’ll be giving. The hyper-casual mobile genre is evolving Hyper-casual mobile games use very simple gameplay and a business model based on in-game advertising. The genre emerged as a sort of backlash or nostalgic revival a couple of years ago. But even though it’s a fairly new genre, it’s already starting to shift. This evolution seems to be branching off into two sub-genres: Ultra-casual games—pushing the simplicity of...
8 min read
#Data & Analytics

Mobile playtime increases by 62%, with IAP up by around 30% in Q1

As millions of people work from home or are on furlough, they’ve needed something to pass the time: streaming TV shows, learning instruments and, of course, playing games. At least, that’s the assumption. We dug into our data to find that playtime has soared and people are spending more, but each genre is affected differently. We’ve analyzed our data in two ways 1. Global network analysis Our first approach was to look at the overall data across our network. Over 75,000 developers use GameAnalytics to analyze how gamers are playing. That’s about 40,000 active mobile games, all in all, including 40 of the top 100 most downloaded games on the app stores. By combining all this data, we can see how more than a third of the world’s mobile players are behaving. Specifically, we analyzed playtime and how much people...
Rovio GameCamp Presentation
10 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Customizing Rewarded Ads using Machine Learning – Lessons from Rovio

A couple of months ago, we had the pleasure of attending Google’s GameCamp, which was filled to the brim with gamedev content delivered from the best and brightest in mobile gaming. While there, Elif Büyükcan, the Business Intelligence Director at Rovio Entertainment, shared with us how they’ve been using rewarded ads in their games. We’re here to report on their story, and what you can learn from them. Elif’s main message was this:  “Getting your monetization model right is incredibly important. It takes a lot of time, thought and testing. You need to be constantly measuring, learning and adapting. This makes machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) your best friends.” And today, we’ll go through everything we learned from their talk (specifically about machine learning), including: The process Rovio use to hone their monetization models, a case study of...
11 min read
#Game Design

5 Things to Consider When Designing Hyper-Casual Games

Editors note: This blog was written by hyper-casual specialists, JoyPac, and is based on their recent webinar: Design Strategies for Hyper-Casual Game Development. JoyPac specializes in publishing hit hyper-casual games across the globe, and today they have agreed to share their top tips and strategies. To develop a successful hyper-casual game at hyper-fast speed, you need to have a clear production process that focuses on game design. A lot of developers jump into creating hyper-casual games without proper planning and without proper testing. This often leaves them with little idea of how much appeal their game will have, and with a lot of hard work going to waste. We (JoyPac) recently hosted a webinar on this exact subject, along with Umami Games and SuperPlus Games. Based on that webinar, we’ve put together five major things to consider before you set...