Every day hundreds of new games are released. Many of them are made by small studios or even solo developers. Some games are “dream projects,” others are first attempts at the craft. There are also titles made to grab some of the income away from the big players, like Playrix or Supercell. But most of them have one thing in common – they will likely not gain any popularity because the companies made a significant mistake at the concept stage: they didn’t check if their idea was actually in demand.
AppQuantum and other publishers and developers never take on a project without thoroughly evaluating the market situation. In their research, AppQuantum these following assets:
- Their teams’ combined experience.
- Analytical services.
- Industry best practices.
- Specialists who constantly watch out for mobile game industry trends do a massive amount of work.
All of the above, of course, costs a hefty amount. But what if you’re a small developer without a large budget and a team of analysts on hand? You can still conduct market research by yourself. AppQuantum’s Producer Alina Zlotnik will be your guide in this article. She’ll tell you what you can do on your own if you don’t have access to the resources and expertise of a large mobile publisher.
Market research
In this case, market research is any research done to find or check a specific trend. The main objectives of this are to find a niche, genre, and setting for a project and analyze the competition and their games. One can also research to confirm a known trend or, on the contrary, verify that the team’s idea is non-workable. The market changes quickly and constantly. What was popular yesterday can be forgotten tomorrow, making thorough market research vital.
It’s important not to rush this process and analyze the data thoroughly. It takes a few hours to research, provided you know the trend you’re looking for. If not, the process can take days to weeks.
Evaluating an existing idea
You might already have an idea for a mobile game. All you need to do now is find out its chances of success in the current market. The research will begin by looking at the livelihood of an idea from a marketing point of view, using a PvP crossword game as an example.
For that, one needs to:
- Study the current state of PvP crosswords on the leading stores (AppStore and Google Play);
- Analyze the state of the genre using specialized services;
- Verify the feasibility of developing the game and conclude.
Studying the competition
At this stage, it should be enough to run a precise search on Google Play or AppStore to find relevant games. To see whether or not they fit the criteria, one should play each one or at least look through their descriptions and screenshots.
This part takes the longest, but it can’t be neglected. There’s a risk that non-relevant games might make it into your research at this stage. This exercise will affect the analysis and overall results.
Example search results:
You must put together a list of games that fit the idea you chose to move on to the next stage. With PvP crosswords, Pictawords and Kryss are perfect fits.
It’s good to also look at the “Related Apps” list suggested by the store. It often includes games that fit the concept but aren’t easily found through search.
Studying the state of the genre with specialized services
To analyze the market for this article, AppQuantum used the following services: App Annie, SimilarWeb, SensorTower, AppMagic.
Most analytical services are heavily limited without paying extra for premium accounts.
To find out the current state of the market, you should pay attention to indirect factors:
- Number of competitors and their growth rate;
- Movement of similar games through top lists;
- Quantity of reviews at different periods.
First of all, let’s build a graph based on the games we studied, where we compare game ratings. The most accessible service to do that with is AppMagic, which allows users to compare projects by store feature effectiveness and track app movements in Top Free lists.
At this point, you can continue looking for competitors using the “Related Apps” sections on AppMagic or Similarweb.
However, it’s essential to consider that AppMagic limits the number of apps you can compare simultaneously – no more than 10.
The resulting graph will look something like this:
To make sure the graph is at least partially correct in its reflection of the market, let’s take a look at competitor income (Sensor Tower, December 2021):
- Liga Slova. Bitva Crossvordov — <$5,000
- Kryss — $70,000
- Word Wars – Word Game — $90,000
- Word Battle — <$5,000
- King of words — <$5,000
- Word Wars – PVP Crossword Game — <$5,000
- Wordgrams — $10,000
Initial conclusions we can draw from the graph are:
- The trend first appeared in June 2020;
- Two projects went on to gain the majority of the market: Kryss and Word Wars. Kryss is a classic PvP crossword, and Word Wars is a scrabble-like game.
- Most games that tried to come into the market either flopped or got an insignificant part of the audience.
Let’s take a more detailed look at the genre’s top games:
Kryss:
Word Wars
From the graphs, one can see that:
- The quantity of reviews (and, in turn, installs) for WordWars doesn’t go down, unlike Kryss, which has a slightly negative trend;
- The games have enjoyed solid positions in the Top Free lists for a long time.
Findings
Having studied the market, we see uneven results. On the one hand, the niche is growing – new games come out and get their own, albeit small, audience. On the other hand, getting the audience away from competitors is nearly impossible without considerable marketing investments.
In this case, it pays to look at the niche’s top player’s income.
It would be best to consider that the services don’t show ad revenue, so income for ad-monetized projects could be scores larger than what’s shown in open sources. According to Sensor Tower, Kryss (on Google Play) earned $70,000 in December 2021, while Word Wars (also on Google Play) made $90,000.
Is it worth developing a project that would only gain a small percentage of that income? Only you can decide that. This money can be a good start for small teams, while larger companies are unlikely to be interested in those numbers and move on to another concept.
In search of something new
The easiest way to research new ideas is to look through the latest articles on industry-related websites: GameRefinery, App2Top, Deconstructor of Fun, etc.
Early in the year, many media outlets published their predictions for how the game industry and its genres will develop. Only time will tell whether they will come true or not. However, it would help if you didn’t write them off. Such pieces are often based on industry expertise, and their authors make reasonable and logical assumptions.
It’s a little more complicated when a trend is already found but is still unstable. To see what we’re talking about, let’s look at one of the most talked-about games on the casual market — Merge-2. Gaming experts are divided in their opinions. Some believe that jumping on the bandwagon was only worth it after Merge Mansion came out. Others think this segment has only begun to develop, and the best is yet to come.
Often, if many outlets and services talk about a trend, you’re too late. But there are situations when a trend lives on. And no matter how many people say it’s about to die, it just doesn’t go away. One such example is the hyper-casual game’s boom. When it first appeared, almost everyone predicted the niche would die quickly. However, one look at the stores clarifies that these projects are very much alive.
Studying new releases is one of the most challenging ways to find ideas, which requires a deep understanding of the market and trends. Storeglide and AppAgg are the tools to help with that. These services help track game launches in different countries. Perhaps you’ll get lucky and spot a new wave right at the start, but it will likely be impossible to verify your hypothesis. You’ll need to rely on intuition. But with significant risk comes an ample opportunity to be one of the first to jump on the bandwagon.
To check whether a trend is coming up, you can look at the game’s growth rate over the past month. Suppose a particular title shows the growth that isn’t stopping soon. For a game in the top list, this is unsurprising. However, a single match is not enough to conclude the whole genre or niche. For more severe and grounded conclusions, it’s necessary to analyze the project’s competitors.
Conclusion
Market research is a large body of work necessary to complete to minimize the risks and release a project that can interest the audience. Of course, at first, you might not succeed at becoming a trendsetter and creating something completely new, but there’s nothing terrible about releasing products that appeal to a mass audience. Every new project will stand out and interest more people, and, after a few attempts, you’ll create a game the whole market will be chasing after.
If you’d like to employ deep industry expertise from a team of seasoned professionals, you can reach AppQuantum here.
