Many games are interested in entering the casual gaming space as the mobile gaming industry grows. If you’re moving in that direction or already are there, you might be interested to know what’s happening in the casual game scene at the moment. Or maybe you just want to stay on top of what is happening in the fast-changing mobile game space and seek inspiration across the different genres and markets.
To start this post, I think it would be great to go back to one of our blog posts from 2019 Casual Games Are “Guilding Up,” where we talked about the upcoming trend concerning guild-related features in the casual space.
“Traditionally, guild mechanics have been a “must-have” feature in many midcore genres, such as strategy and RPG games. Casual games have, however, tended to avoid them, relying on much lighter social elements. However, now the tide seems to be turning, and casual games have started to adopt guild mechanics at an increasing pace.”
Casual Games are “Guilding Up” blog post (July 2019)
This is something we wrote back in 2019, and if we check the current trend as of NOW, we can see a significant shift in two years. If you “missed the train” on guild mechanics, maybe that could have been avoided by utilizing GameRefinery’s data. 😉
This is, of course, just an example of one feature, but there are others as well. We’ve seen features that have been typically utilized only in midcore games making their way to more casual games, so there might be more than one feature trend on the rise that could be beneficial to keep an eye on. For example, there is a particular feature that Royal Match and Homescapes, plus just a couple of other games in the casual top 200 grossing have, but in the midcore space, the situation is vice versa. Can you guess the feature from this example? (I’ll give you a hint, it’s something to do with guilds.)
Or maybe there’s something that could be added to your game’s monetization that you haven’t utilized yet, but it could be your golden ticket?
Are you missing out on the best IAPs for casual games?
If you feel that creating the most effective monetization feature set is something you’re having trouble with or just want to find out the best IAPs for casual games, we’ve got you covered. Our Market Explorer tool is the best place to see the most utilized features among the top 200 grossing casual games. You can check it yourself by filtering the data with the monetization features. You’ll find that it’s easy to check out these things, for example:
1. What are the most utilized monetization features based on popularity
2. Which features are just gaining popularity, but they could already work in your game
Finding out what features could contain hidden potential is easy by checking the “Overall Popularity” from the point of view of what is not utilized much yet. You would be amazed what you can find out when comparing casual vs. midcore games. For instance, a good place to start is to go over the top 200 sustained grossing games in casual and midcore categories and compare how these games differ in feature utilization. As guilds were not a big part of casual games some years ago, maybe you can find something interesting from midcore that would fit in with casual games as well?
Find the hidden potential in monetization
These tips mentioned above can also be utilized to research the hidden potential among monetization features by using the Market Explorer tool. There are many features that work extremely well together, so it would make sense to try to find out what those features are, right?
Let’s have a look at the top 200 grossing casual games to see if we can find some hidden potential among monetization features.
As we can see, there are indeed several games that have implemented some sort of gacha into the game, but the “Bulk discount gacha” feature is not really utilized in the top 200 sustained grossing casual space. At least as of now.
So to wrap things up, there are many things that you need to know if you are moving to a casual scene AND a lot of things that you can do if you already are there, but in both cases, having access to data can help you find the hidden potential of your game. If you don’t yet have access to our data and therefore could not click the links, please feel free to schedule a short call with me, and we can check out the data together. 🙂
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