The main trends of the mobile gaming industry according to GREE
The presidents of GREE USA, who previously headed Funzio, spoke about the main trends in the mobile games market.
The current vice presidents of the American division of GREE, Ken Chiu and Anil Dharni, who earlier this year sold their own company Funzio to GREE for $210 million, discussed the development of the market in an interview with Gamasutra. By the way, we haven’t gotten ahead of ourselves yet, this deal is currently one of the most successful for GREE in recent times.
Below are the six main theses of the conversation.
1. New genres await the industry. They will be niche and presumably focused on midcore (from English mid-core) and hardcore audiences.
Clash of Clans is the most successful midcore project of recent times.
The more mature the mobile market is, the more diverse it will be, claims Darni. Strategic, construction and gambling games will be added (in cash tops) new genres.
“Five months ago, battlers didn’t exist yet, and now it’s one of the most successful genres on both platforms,” Darni gives an example. – I am sure we will witness how new genres – like card games and RTS – will break out into both the midcore and hardcore markets. And, yes, there will definitely be new niches.”
Ken Chiu agrees with him: “Users are moving away from casual games to midcore and hardcore. Those companies that are engaged in such projects will be successful.”
2. The most successful mobile games will in many ways resemble the current MMOs for desktop systems.
Recently, more and more full-fledged MMOs have been released on mobile platformsUsually social games are criticized for the fact that they are completely devoid of sociality.
Chiu is sure that the situation will change soon: “We’re going to see a lot of really social games.”
Games, according to him, will be primarily focused on group play: the formation of guilds and clans, the struggle between them, cooperative passage of game campaigns, etc.
“Projects like SongPop and Paper Toss Friends demonstrate that the more social your game is, the higher the chance to attract the user,” adds Darni, hinting that such sociality is the key to success.
3. The cost of application development will increase significantly.
Lili – the most beautiful three-dimensional adventure game on iOS”Look at what games were popular a few years ago, and compare them with the current hits.
You will see a significant difference,” Chiu will be assured. – “Today we see games with more complex gameplay, a different level of art. And this qualitative growth will continue for several more years.”
It is clear that it is impossible without increasing production costs. So, following the increase in marketing costs, the price of the development itself will go up.
4. The development of iron is one of the most important catalysts for the growth of gaming experience.
The iOS port of Rage of the Gladiator with Wii turned out to be several times more technologically advanced than the originalAlready today, mobile devices are able to easily reproduce console projects from 10 years ago, it is possible that in a year we will see the first full-fledged ports from current-generation consoles on tablets (we are already seeing the first ports now).
This is a sea of new opportunities for developers.
An alternative example: due to the widespread use of the LTE standard, developers are thinking less and less about download restrictions, about the size of the distribution as a result, they add more content to the project.
5. There is a lot of game analytics: and this has not only positive sides.
DragonVale is a long-lived American top with millions of regular users whose behavior in the game needs to be monitored Analytics has become an integral part of the mobile market.
Only lazy people do not offer their services for its monitoring and data analysis today. There are enough high-quality and inexpensive solutions, but there are also problems.
There is too much data. It’s not like dealing with the balance of projects, starting from all new arrays of information, just tracking it becomes a difficult task for both analysts and services and hardware.
6. Improving visibility is still a problem. One of the possible solutions is to expand the functionality of the stores themselves.
Rovio doesn’t have to worry about getting their project noticed, unlike most mobile game developersMany modern mobile app developers have a problem with promotion at exactly the moment when they place it in the App Store or Google Play.
They either don’t know, or they don’t have the means to make it noticeable.
Darni is sure that in order to improve the visibility of the application, it is necessary to remember about two elements: social networks (the choice of a friend always greatly affects the user’s choice) and search (it is often used in app stores, but at this stage this tool has not yet been debugged, both in the App Store and Google Play).
But, most importantly, Darni talks about the need to expand the functionality of the stores so that it is immediately clear, for example, the DAU of the application. Thanks to this, it will be visible how many users are in the game now, whether anyone is playing it. Also, according to his assessment, it is necessary to change the categories (so that they more accurately reflect the essence), add a recommendation mechanism.
The original can be found on Gamasutra here.
