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Research gaming settings



A year ago, we needed to determine which gaming setting is better suited for a mobile strategy. Should we take fantasy, or some sci-fi settings? Maybe it should have been the Skyforge setting? There was no definite answer. Therefore, we decided to conduct a study of the audience of the Mail.Ru Mini-game portal. This, by the way, is one of the largest portals in Russia dedicated to games, with a monthly multi-million audience. Read on to find out which settings are most in demand by users of mobile games.

In our survey agreed to take part 30 thousand visitors. We chose the SurveyMonkey service as a working tool. This is a web application designed for online collection of responses and their further analysis. Studying the mini-games, we tried to identify some general trends characteristic of the audience of all mobile, social and browser games. Of course, in such cases it is necessary to make some assumptions. After all, any survey implies that we approximate the data obtained from selected people to a huge multi-million audience of potential players. And here it is important to remember that the opinion of visitors to any portal, even if it is rather large, does not reflect the opinion of the entire potential audience of our games by 100%.

What were we asking about?


The main question we asked respondents was which gaming settings they want to see in new mobile games. We were also interested in demographics: who comes to our portal, what age and gender, which games they play, which genres, how often, do they get paid, do they have mobile phones and which OS do they have?
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We asked the question: “Why can we ask users about the settings? Will not the answers be biased or incorrect? ” We decided that, most likely, they would not, because if we asked about something that requires professional knowledge or is associated with personal motivation, then many could inadvertently respond incorrectly. And when you ask about what a person is not directly interested in and what does not require special competencies, then in general, the results can be considered true. The share of statistical error in the survey of 30 thousand people is insignificant.

Poll results


It was important for us to understand how the interviewed audience differs from the general one in order to draw conclusions about the representativeness of the survey. To do this, we collected a demographic portrait of the player and turned to open sources describing the average data for Russia and the CIS. And the first thing that made an indelible impression on us was the distribution of the phones among our users.



As it turned out, 48% of respondents have a classic cell phone, and not a smartphone based on Windows Phone, Android, iOS or any other OS. By the way, the growth rate of sales of Windows Phone-based phones has increased over the last year. However, the actual proportion of phones on Windows is still small.



It turned out that men and women were almost equally divided, men slightly more. It was very interesting because, according to the Mail.Ru Group report , the share of female audience in mobile and social games is higher. And this is important to remember, because we have to compare the audience of a particular portal and the general audience in Russia and the CIS.



The ratio of age groups also differed slightly from the national average. The most massive, as it should be, groups of 26-35 years and 36-50 years. On our portal, visitors under the age of 18 and 19–25 turned out to be slightly less than the average for Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. And those over 50, on the contrary more. This is logical, because mini-games are popular with older audiences. Moreover, this statistic does not reflect the audience of the entire portal, but only those people who turned out to be the most active and expressed a desire to take part in the survey. Below is a list with an approximate description of the settings, among which the players selected:


We offered users to select settings from a list with about 30 points. It was possible to specify several options. The list itself was compiled on the basis of today's most popular entertainment products: top games, movies, TV shows, books. Respondents saw not only the name of the setting, but also some explanation. For example, the Harry Potter setting is associated with a school of magic, potions, magic, learning, etc. We needed to make sure that users would not have any misunderstandings and misunderstandings. When we asked about the preferred setting, we did not specify the genre of the future game. We asked: “And what genres do you play?”, In order to sort out and select people who play the genre we need. Thereby we wanted to avoid the induced effect, as if we ourselves were pushing for a definite answer.



General statistics surprised us greatly. The leader of the list, we expected to see such popular settings as fantasy, science fiction. Yes, World War II, of course, in the first place, but the beloved by many fantasy - in the seventh. The treasure hunt, oddly enough, very cool left, and we made the assumption that this is due to the large number of games in the Indiana Jones setting. Indy Cat, for example.

Why are Tanks so popular? Analyzing the perception of tank games by different audiences, we saw that the countries of Europe and the CIS belong to the settings of the Second World War quite sensitively. Virtually every family had grandfathers and great-grandfathers who fought in those times. At the same time, the subject of World War II does not have such popularity in the States. If we make a tank simulator for the American audience, it is worth choosing a modern setting with more dynamic and faster tank fights.

It should be noted that such a strange setting as “Prison Break” got into the top three. What is meant by this? This is not so much a game about bandits, as a way to escape from reality. These are games like GTA, with complete permissiveness, which turned out to be very popular among people. Also in the top were classic shooters, fairy tales (mostly Disney stories), ghosts, "Harry Potter", detectives (here we were talking about Victorian England, about its characteristic mysticism, pomp and conquest). And in some way the antiquity was packed here: Ancient Rome and Greece.

Of course, this statistic gave us only interesting information, but did not answer the question “What is the setting for making the game?”. Therefore, the next step was the screening of all visitors who do not have a smartphone based on iOS or Android. That is, they left the results of only those players who can play our games on mobile phones.



After that, the Jailbreak set up jumped into first place. Quite unusual. The Second World War ceded to him a little. But the distribution of the remaining settings has not changed much. Antiquity disappeared, science fiction appeared, places slightly changed, but nothing more of a principle. Again, this did not help us to understand in which setting to make a specific game.

Then we chose those who replied that they pay for games at least once a month. It turned out that so many pay. About 40% answered that they had ever paid for games at least once. About 15% do it monthly. The following picture turned out:



The paying audience, as it turned out, has quite clear, formed ideas about what the setting should be for the game: “World War II”, “Treasure Hunt”, “Fantasy”, “Modernity”. A little running ahead: if you select only a non-paying audience, removing all other filters, then “Prison Break” is pulled out by a large margin. This setting is very popular with people who do not want to pay.

Next we filtered the audience by preference in genres. First, they chose those who like to play various puzzles (“Three in a row”, “Hidden object” and others). Puzzles were taken because it is one of the most popular genres among mobile games.

Among the paying owners of smartphones based on iOS or Android, the leaders stood out:

That is, this segment of users do not like the settings related to modernity, steampunk, cyberbank. By the way, when we conducted a similar survey among game developers, we got a completely different result. The developers thought it was necessary to make games about superheroes in the style of steampunk or cyberpunk, what science fiction needed to do. As it turned out, they are not claimed by the players. Amazing.

Then we chose those who prefer to play strategy. Our game, which we did, was precisely a strategy: a mixture of the city builder (construction), the butler (pumping), and the card game. Therefore, it was interesting for us to look at puzzles, strategies, and RPGs, since in our game there were elements of all these genres.



"Fantasy" finally came out on top. And this explains why so many strategies for top-grossing — Game of Throne, Clash of Clans, and others — have a fantasy setting. On the one hand, it is like a paying audience. On the other hand, can it not be the induced effect here, as with tanks, because there are a lot of strategies and RPGs in the fantasy setting on the market, people are used to the fact that the setting fantasy dominates in this genre? Quite possible. But this did not bring us closer to the answer to the question “In what setting to make the game?”.

Battles, games about the development and pumping, which are used in boevkah. This genre has come to us from Asia, where the key element of the game is leveling. Most often, Fuse / Evolve, when you donate one to the other, and then evolve. Although there are other pumping systems. The battles are somewhat similar in their mechanics to RPGs, so we decided to analyze users who appreciate games of this genre. The fact is that it was very difficult for us to identify the audience that plays in the battles. Just because many users find it hard to explain what a battler is. But about the RPG information on the market more, this genre is much more familiar in our country.



Again fantasy dominance, as in strategies. Only in this case, total domination. Interestingly, there are settings in the RPG that did not pop up before: “Maniacs”, “Middle Ages”, “Postapokaliptik”. In other genres such settings did not show high positions. This means that for such RPGs there is already a ready-made audience.

After evaluating the settings most demanded by players in puzzles, strategies and role-playing games, we continued to study the answers of the audience in order to learn a little more about games that prefer other genres. The next genre that interested us in this study was gambling. We took slots (slot machines), roulette, gambling card games (poker, preference), billiards to them.



Quite interesting results: there is something in common with the motifs of slot machines popular on the network.

Simulators and sports games were analyzed separately. Racing is also in this category. Paying players who prefer these genres, as it turned out, do not mind riding a tank. It is also interesting that this group of people is one of the few who highly appreciates games about Modernity.



Analyzing this audience, we thought how much these people play on mobile devices. Agree, to play on a small screen, even if a good tablet in the race and other simulators are not as convenient as on a large monitor of a powerful gaming computer. After the screenings by smartphone owners were removed, the distribution of the settings slightly changed.

Finally, the preferences of shooter lovers were analyzed. Under this generic name, we put together genres such as action, shooter, and even fighting, which many players called shooters. The results were unexpected. modernity, which we expected to see in the first place, entered the list only on the 4th. And World War II was ahead of everyone else by a wide margin than in other genres. In the top escaped settings related to the war against aliens. Our players love to chop alien creatures into cabbage.



To get some additional information on the preferences of the audience, we need to find out not only what people love, but also what they do not want to play under any circumstances. We noticed a very interesting trend: the audience in the post-Soviet space most of all does not like settings, united by alien themes, alien culture - these are westerns, anime, gangsters, Asian Middle Ages, samurai, stone age (oddly enough). Exactly these settings were the least claimed.

But it would be wrong to assume that the entire audience does not like these settings. We decided to do the segmentation and divide people of the age groups “under 18 years old” and “over 18 years old”.



Among the general audience, less than 4% would like to see a game about superheroes, and among young people, 12.5% ​​are interested in such a game. That is, the younger generation is much more in demand Western and Asian cultures. Westerns, on the contrary, young people do not like. But, judging by the statistics, nobody loves them, it happened.

We do not recommend making settings directly related to religion, as this may provoke a negative attitude towards the project. But to incorporate various religious motifs into the game, as was done in Skyforge, turned out to be quite cool. And when we worked on our strategy, we borrowed a lot from mythology, the Bible, and various religious and philosophical trends. There are seven sins, four factions that personify chaos, order, good, evil. Yes, they are called not so with us, they have their own entourage and names, but we emphasized with stylistics, graphics, behavior, characters and dialogues.

Brief conclusions


  1. We did not expect to see the total popularity of the Prison Break setting, which somehow slips everywhere, and its dominance among non-paying audiences. "Prison Break" is a quest with a bunch of puzzles ("Escape from Shawshank", "Rock", "Thief"). In fact, criminal romance. By the way, My World has recently studied the gaming market, and some time ago, the games that were devoted to this topic had the greatest profits. For example, “Tyuryaga” from “Kefir”. Especially there was a surge in popularity somewhere in 2012-2013.
    Social networks are generally interesting to analyze: it is possible to single out entire small game epochs by what games appear in their catalogs. For the last 3-4 years there was an era of farms, then city builders, then there was a fashion for RPGs, and almost all of these RPGs were in an anime theme. There is an opinion that the era of franchises is beginning now, and now at the forefront is not only the type of setting, but first and foremost the popular game world. For example, in the top boxing games, we increasingly see games on the Tolkien universes (The Lord of the Rings: Legends of Middle-earth), Marvel (MARVEL Contest of Champions, The Amazing Spider-Man), Disney films (Maleficent, Braveheart, Cars), etc.
  2. Fantasy is popular among paying audiences. Fans of this genre in parallel noted a sufficiently large number of other settings. And lovers of modern times, on the contrary, noted a very small number of other settings. For them, the “Jailbreak” sometimes slipped, but they did not have a mass love for different settings, that is, they are a very picky audience.
  3. The least popular are the settings, which represent an alien culture for our audience - Western and Asian. We did not analyze the Muslim, Arabic settings. We have Aladdin hit Disney's Tales. There were Asian samurai and anime as a separate setting. But the same "Harry Potter", as it turned out, our perceive positively. We believe that "Harry Potter" is perceived as a fairy tale about Cinderella. This is an orphan boy whose life is bad, Dursley is hated; and now the wonderful world of fairy tales opens up for him and brings happiness. Therefore, "Harry Potter" is also popular with us, as in Europe and the USA.

As a result, our strategy was made in a fantasy setting. At the same time, the game used the familiar mythology: vampires, werewolves, elves and orcs - that is, something that fits into classic fantasy.

Despite the general popularity of Prison Break, we deliberately refused to use it. The fact is that we made a strategy with elements of a butler, and among fans of this genre, Prison Break is less popular than fantasy. About this setting should be told separately. As you remember, many of the good old classic games started with “Prison Break”. The Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Baldur's Gate 2 and many others. When we analyzed how to start the plot of the game, two of the most relevant beginnings were chosen: the first is a school of magic or some kind of training camp, that is, you were taught, and the game begins. Today it is the most popular solution. In second place was “Prison Break” (prisons in a global sense). Either this main character is in a very difficult situation. Very many farms start with the fact that the main character is sitting in the office, everything is bad, for the last 100 dollars he went and bought himself a wetland. There are a huge number of games that start that way. Either you need to escape from somewhere in captivity, from prison, or you get into another world, and the game begins. All this is a kind of escapism.

We also analyzed the characters who must accompany the player at the beginning of the game in order to ensure maximum involvement. The two most appropriate options: a wise old man, a grandfather with a beard, who captivates with his knowledge, intelligence and kindness, that is, an analogue of Dumbledore; and a young girl, beautiful, with huge breasts that fall out of the screen. It turned out that games in which other characters were used have slightly less retention of the first day. Perhaps it is this beautiful Madame and the wise old man who help people linger in the game a little longer. For our game, we finally chose a wise mentor, as the character who best fits into the plot of the game of alchemy.

By the way, we also had a study on the retention of players, but this is a separate topic. Strategies have the most retention on mobile platforms. In good mobile profitable strategies, sticky-factor (ratio of daily audience to monthly) reaches 17%. It is very cool.

Retention of the 28th day on the mobile platform averages 5.5%. That is only 5.5% of the audience we attracted will remain in the game by the end of the month. For comparison, in social games this parameter can reach 30-40%, in browser games - 40-50%, powerful client games, such as Allods Online, had more than 60% at the peak of their development. Of course, all games have a life cycle, and sooner or later they die. But mobile platforms have the lowest retention and sticky-factor. And even ARPPU is not the highest, while the cost of advertising is very high.

If you have questions about the setting, I will be happy to answer them in the comments. I hope that our research will help you make the right choice at the beginning of work on new projects.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/264261/

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