Navigating Overseas: Innovations in the Mobile Gaming Market
As the mobile gaming market matures, competition intensifies. Since 2022, mobile games have faced challenges with declining downloads and revenue. Simultaneously, user acquisition costs have shown a significant downward trend over the past two years.
On the other hand, the top charts of the mobile gaming industry are becoming more stable. In the second and third quarters of 2023, among the top ten apps in terms of downloads and revenue, only one was newly launched, while the rest were older games.
To maintain growth in this fiercely competitive sector, examining successful and innovative games from the past couple of years is beneficial. Observing these globally acclaimed games can provide valuable insights for learning and adaptation.
This blog post explores the evolving landscape of the mobile gaming industry, highlighting the challenges and strategies for staying competitive. By examining recent trends and successful innovations, it offers a roadmap for developers seeking to thrive in the global market.
Section 1: Product Innovation in Themes
Recently, the mobile gaming industry has introduced two new thematic designs: scenarios closely mimicking real-life and those depicting idealized life settings.
I highlight the emerging trends in mobile game theme design, focusing on the innovation of integrating realistic and idealized life scenes. By exploring these new approaches, developers can gain insights into creating engaging and relatable gaming experiences.
1.1 Close to Real-Life Scenarios
This type of theme often integrates traditional games with common scenes from daily life. For example, incorporating the traditional game of Huarong Road into a parking lot scene.
Similar scenarios also include supermarket shelves, claw machines.
1.2 Ideal Life Scenarios
This type of theme involves integrating poetic and distant representative scenarios into the game. For example, moving various animals on a farm according to the rules of a sliding puzzle.
Innovative theme design not only enhances artistic effects but also caters to different user groups, providing players with a refreshing experience. This can attract more users when purchasing ads and achieve the goal of solidifying the user base by breaking through core gameplay.
Section 2: New Theme Designs
In addition, in the traditional game mode, the difficulty of the game becomes higher as you progress to the later stages, and the greater the pressure on players to earn money, which will affect the long-term retention of users. However, some hyper-casual games have changed this logic, hoping that users can experience a simpler experience as they play and enjoy the happiness brought by the game.
Adding more elements to traditional game play is another manifestation of game play innovation. We can learn from a few examples.
This game converts the original static elements in ordinary match-3 games into dynamic elements, which not only improves the fun of the game, but also increases the retention rate by 4%-8%.
2.1 Embracing Nature
Design themes that resonate with nature, such as forest scenes, rivers, farmland, and mountains to create an immersive experience.
2.2 Classic Retro Integrate classic retro elements to evoke a sense of nostalgia among players.
2.3 Fantasy World Create a fantasy world full of imagination, drawing players into a magical realm. - Example: Dragons, wizards, magical lands.
Section 3: User experience and game interaction
In addition to theme packaging, the diversification of gameplay and interactions can also bring players a better experience. Regarding this, some game practices can provide us with inspiration.
3.1 Even traditional hyper-casual games can also innovate experiences that are closer to users’ mobile phone usage habits.
For example, in classic slider games, players generally need to slide in a specified direction. However, if the direction is marked on each block, the player only needs to click to make the block move in the specified direction, which makes it easier for players to get started.
In addition, in the traditional game mode, the difficulty of the game becomes higher as you progress to the later stages, and the greater the pressure on players to earn money, which will affect the long-term retention of users. However, some hyper-casual games have changed this logic, hoping that users can experience a simpler experience as they play and enjoy the happiness brought by the game.
3.2 A blend of diverse gameplay elements
Adding more elements to traditional game play is another manifestation of game play innovation. We can learn from a few examples.
This game converts the original static elements in ordinary match-3 games into dynamic elements, which not only improves the fun of the game, but also increases the retention rate by 4%-8%.
New Marketing Methods
Marketing is for products and services. This is a traditional mindset, but now some new games are adopting a marketing-first approach. They develop marketing strategies before their products and services, achieving remarkable results.
Last year, the most searched keyword on Google in the United States was the game "Wordle." It differs from traditional crossword games in just one aspect: the difficulty of passing the first level is extremely high. Normally, developers hope to increase user downloads by lowering the entry barrier of the game, but Wordle did the opposite. Its way of doing things made it difficult for most people to pass the level, sparking curiosity and competitive spirit, which in turn rapidly gained a large amount of attention and downloads.
