Collectible Card Games: The Secret to Success on Mobile Platforms

This topic has been repeatedly raised on the pages of foreign sources. The portal App2Top also devoted several analytical articles to card collection games, the main conclusions and conclusions of which are presented here on Habré.

Statistics

Three of the ten games of the box office American top 10 Google Play are card collection games. In the top 10 App Store box office, there is so far represented one game of this category, which, by the way, has not left this top for the past three months. This is the Rage of Bahamut , which in the American market alone earns, according to the most conservative estimates, $ 2-3 million a month. In Japan, the game of the same genre can earn on top positions up to $ 8 million per month.
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The popularity of card collection games

According to Gamasutra, Xiaolei Zhang, director of marketing company D2C, one of the reasons for the success of such games is the users' passion for collecting. In Japan, this culture has long been established, as in the United States.

This is what developers use: to attract the attention of users, it’s enough to add maps to the game, Jan is sure. In turn, the favorite character of the game on the map will motivate the user to purchase. Plus, the character from the setting that the player understands allows you to quickly understand the rules and what bonuses the card gives.

But collecting is not interesting in itself, if there is no PvP, which is necessary to retain users. For example, not so long ago, the Korean publisher Com2uS reported that in their Homerun Battle in PvP mode was played over 400 million times.

By creating a MMORPG card in miniature, that is, allowing players to buy new cards, change them, join guilds, you can get a group of loyal users. How well you work with them, update the game and upgrade the deck of cards, it depends on whether the players will spend money.

The second feature of card collection games is simplicity of development. Having created the engine, developers can constantly release both new maps and new games in general, simply by changing the graphics and UI. This dramatically reduces development costs. In addition, each time, simply changing the images on the cards, you can cover a new audience.

Perspectives

According to Salya Jan, card collection games have one major drawback - the one who spends more time and money wins. But this fact is at the same time an advantage in terms of stable earnings with the presence of fans. As a result, Jan is confident that card collection games will become an independent game genre with its own standards and metrics.

Russian developers, although understanding the prospects for the trend of card collection games, cannot boast any special successes in this area. Why? Maybe Habr's readers can share their thoughts on this topic.

We see the main reason as the fact that the geek communities in Russia are still underdeveloped, while in Japan and the USA they feed the entire market. So, it’s not worth hoping for a similar success of card collection games in Russia, but you should think about the release of our developers with these games on the American and Japanese markets.