When checking out the deconstructions of some of the best performing games (and seeing the rise of social elements in general), you might have seen something interesting, “hangout areas.”
Perhaps this is familiar to you from NBA2K19 “The Neighborhood,” but these areas (that are outside of core gameplay) are found in, for example, PUBG, Fortnite, Roblox, and numerous games in China (QQ Dancer, Audition Online, Aotu World, QQ Speed to name a few). POP! Slots ™ Live Vegas Casino has already done something a bit similar in Casino space, but it could be expanded in a similar manner as the “hangaround” areas in other genres.
(This example is from QQ Speed. By the way, the Chinese market is a good place to get inspiration from as many trends we see in the west first find their way into Chinese games, so I highly recommend unlocking that market in GameRefinery.)
With this market research information, what could we do next? Well, let’s take a look at something like Slotomania and part of our Analyst’s Overview of the game to see what the game has already done:
As this collection meta has been already done in one of the most successful Slot games out there, and proven to work, there could be an interesting opportunity to innovate this genre by introducing a “hangout area” to bring even more depth to the gameplay experience.
Think of this “hangout area” as an area where you can enter different casinos to play different games, visit a barbershop to customize your hairstyle, hang out with guild members or buy some cool clothes from the stores. I mean, there are really so many possibilities to what you could do with this area that imagination is your only limit. (and development resources :D)
All of this would also go nicely hand in hand with a possible collection meta and even make it quite fitting, e.g., to implement Promotional Collaboration Events like in Tennis Clash – or anything else innovative that you can come up with for that matter.
But also make it possible to think of the decoration layer as well. In my opinion, there’s still a lot of room to innovate in this genre 🙂
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