About popular games in the Apple AppStore and Google Play
Hello!
With the mobile team of Mail.Ru Group, we are actively exploring the local markets of Google Play and the AppStore, studying the interests of the audience in certain game genres, trying to figure out what needs more attention to be paid when developing.
We have accumulated a decent amount of data, and today I would like to lay out some of our research, which should help a novice developer in understanding the market situation.
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For the game developer, the most authoritative rating is the place where he plays top games. I think no one will argue with that. The higher the place of the game in the ranking, the more the game gets organic traffic. Another significant factor is what many developers are trying to (nowadays) make games for: money. The main criteria for the selection of games for our analysis was the mandatory finding of the game in the top for at least four days and a smooth exit from it, if this, of course, was the case. A smooth exit gives a clear picture of what is happening - in this case, the reason for exit is most often not a depletion of the marketing budget, but a drop in demand for the game. At the very least, this is how we filter one-day games.
Games that meet the selection criteria in the study, I will call "popular."
The data presented below should help developers in some issues of developing a game that can become popular.
The first thing I would like to start with is a genre . Hereinafter, the genre will be the subcategory of the game in each of the two stores.
From the diagrams it is clear that the games of the genres "Arcade" and "Action" are popular on both platforms. In Google Play, 41% of the arcade games (in Google Play, the genre of arcade games includes action movies). In the AppStore, the top 5 popular genres are also led by action films and arcades, for a total of 29%. The percentage on Google Play is blurred due to the number of game genres (19 vs. 6 on Google Play).
Decided on the genre, switch to the device . If everything is clear on Google Play (a single rating for all devices), then with the AppStore it is somewhat more complicated.
Only 17% of games are available only to iPad users. IPhone-only games are not far away - 25%. All the rest (58%) popular games were universal for both devices. This fact is unimportant, but if you decide to make the application universal, then you should know that if the user has both an iPhone and an iPad, and he decides to install the game on both devices, then the installation from that device will be used as a setting for ranking games. where he first made the installation. The question of the availability of the game is individual and may largely depend on the marketing strategy of the product.
Now about the model of monetization of games. Our results are not very different from the studies of other companies engaged in analytics of the mobile market.
Absolute leadership - in games on the model of free-to-play. Every quarter, the number of free-to-play-games is growing, and the number of completely free games remains at the same level.
The weight of the game is an important parameter, because in the AppStore there is a restriction on downloading applications over the mobile network - no more than 50 MB. Applications "harder" can be downloaded only via Wi-Fi. Despite this limitation, the average weight of a popular application in the AppStore is 152MB. This is even more than on Google Play, where there are no restrictions (113 MB).
Now we will talk about countries in which a certain number of popular games appear weekly. For the study they took some countries that are interesting in terms of money (where high ARPU is already installed, and those that can bring enough money to the developer in the near future). Below are charts for the AppStore and Google Play, where for each country we made a breakdown by popular genres (for Google Play - all genres, for the AppStore - top-3 of each country):
AppStore: Least of all such games in Japan, France, Brazil and China. But this does not mean that competition in these countries is less. In China, up to 20 games are displayed daily in the top-25. True, they stay there for a long time.
Google Play: The undisputed leader is South Korea. This is the place where applications are able to enter the top on the third day (although this is quite problematic with the Google Play top algorithm), and where almost four times more games are output every week than in the USA.
I would like to finish my story with companies that are worth being compared to. These teams in the last six months have come out the most games that are popular with the audience. On the AppStore, this is Disney (7 titles), on Google Play - CJ E & M (5 titles).
In the article, I analyzed only some of the relevant parameters for the evaluation of games, if you know some other interesting pieces, you have interesting statistics - I will be glad to comment!
With the mobile team of Mail.Ru Group, we are actively exploring the local markets of Google Play and the AppStore, studying the interests of the audience in certain game genres, trying to figure out what needs more attention to be paid when developing.
We have accumulated a decent amount of data, and today I would like to lay out some of our research, which should help a novice developer in understanding the market situation.
')
For the game developer, the most authoritative rating is the place where he plays top games. I think no one will argue with that. The higher the place of the game in the ranking, the more the game gets organic traffic. Another significant factor is what many developers are trying to (nowadays) make games for: money. The main criteria for the selection of games for our analysis was the mandatory finding of the game in the top for at least four days and a smooth exit from it, if this, of course, was the case. A smooth exit gives a clear picture of what is happening - in this case, the reason for exit is most often not a depletion of the marketing budget, but a drop in demand for the game. At the very least, this is how we filter one-day games.
Games that meet the selection criteria in the study, I will call "popular."
The data presented below should help developers in some issues of developing a game that can become popular.
The first thing I would like to start with is a genre . Hereinafter, the genre will be the subcategory of the game in each of the two stores.
From the diagrams it is clear that the games of the genres "Arcade" and "Action" are popular on both platforms. In Google Play, 41% of the arcade games (in Google Play, the genre of arcade games includes action movies). In the AppStore, the top 5 popular genres are also led by action films and arcades, for a total of 29%. The percentage on Google Play is blurred due to the number of game genres (19 vs. 6 on Google Play).
Decided on the genre, switch to the device . If everything is clear on Google Play (a single rating for all devices), then with the AppStore it is somewhat more complicated.
Only 17% of games are available only to iPad users. IPhone-only games are not far away - 25%. All the rest (58%) popular games were universal for both devices. This fact is unimportant, but if you decide to make the application universal, then you should know that if the user has both an iPhone and an iPad, and he decides to install the game on both devices, then the installation from that device will be used as a setting for ranking games. where he first made the installation. The question of the availability of the game is individual and may largely depend on the marketing strategy of the product.
Now about the model of monetization of games. Our results are not very different from the studies of other companies engaged in analytics of the mobile market.
Absolute leadership - in games on the model of free-to-play. Every quarter, the number of free-to-play-games is growing, and the number of completely free games remains at the same level.
The weight of the game is an important parameter, because in the AppStore there is a restriction on downloading applications over the mobile network - no more than 50 MB. Applications "harder" can be downloaded only via Wi-Fi. Despite this limitation, the average weight of a popular application in the AppStore is 152MB. This is even more than on Google Play, where there are no restrictions (113 MB).
Now we will talk about countries in which a certain number of popular games appear weekly. For the study they took some countries that are interesting in terms of money (where high ARPU is already installed, and those that can bring enough money to the developer in the near future). Below are charts for the AppStore and Google Play, where for each country we made a breakdown by popular genres (for Google Play - all genres, for the AppStore - top-3 of each country):
AppStore: Least of all such games in Japan, France, Brazil and China. But this does not mean that competition in these countries is less. In China, up to 20 games are displayed daily in the top-25. True, they stay there for a long time.
Google Play: The undisputed leader is South Korea. This is the place where applications are able to enter the top on the third day (although this is quite problematic with the Google Play top algorithm), and where almost four times more games are output every week than in the USA.
I would like to finish my story with companies that are worth being compared to. These teams in the last six months have come out the most games that are popular with the audience. On the AppStore, this is Disney (7 titles), on Google Play - CJ E & M (5 titles).
In the article, I analyzed only some of the relevant parameters for the evaluation of games, if you know some other interesting pieces, you have interesting statistics - I will be glad to comment!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/181974/
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