January 2, 2020

Sips Happen #4: Exploring the Hypercasual Decline

Sips Happen #4: Exploring the Hypercasual Decline

As the brilliant people behind Deconstructor of Fun (great podcast, even better reads) laid out 4 reasons why the hypercasual gold rush may be coming to an end, GameRefinery published trends highlighting why the Idle genre is poised to be taking over, and Exient CEO forecasted game makers and publishers will now have to transition to deeper gameplay to bump up retention times. Interesting takes, just a few weeks after we’ve seen Voodoo doubling down on hypercasual with the Gumbug acquisition.

State of the Market

• While the holiday season is a notoriously tough time to be acquiring users, it is the perfect time to monetise your already-engaged players: mobile games generated $210 million in revenue on Christmas Day only, an 8% increase from 2018.
• 2019 is the year Epic pushed its Epic Game Store with a flurry of exclusive deals. Players didn’t take too kindly on this.
• 2 Pokemon Instant Games have just been released on the Facebook Gaming platform: Pokemon Tower Battle and Pokemon Medallion Battle.
• There’s been a lot of talk about The Witcher 3, a 2015 game, after Netflix released the first season of the show based on the IP. As the game saw a recent re-release (on Nintendo Switch), the era where games were just short-lived properties seem to be over.
• PCGamesN, not known for its fondness of gaming console, has a hot take about the upcoming Xbox Series X: Microsoft has admitted defeat in the console war and just built a PC.
• BoJo’s new government has barely had time to warm their seats before a charity urged them to legislate loot boxes as gambling. Not sure it’ll be at the top of their minds with everything that’s going on in the UK.

China

• As we’re entering the 20s, RadiiChina takes a look at the defining Chinese games of the past decade. A few obvious ones, and many good surprises.
  • Taking a more conventional stance, Abacus lists all the usual suspects in the first half of its 15 best mobile games hailing from China.
• Some of these games are catering to an audience long-left-out: Female gamers. Not surprising, considering that half of China’s 600+ million gamers are women.
• Beijing and Shanghai have big ambitions for their roles in the Gaming World (« International Capital of Online Games » and « International Capital of Esports » respectively). analysts, however, are more wary, citing the tightening grip of the CCP on content control as the main barrier to China’s lofty aspirations.
• GTA Online has become the latest battleground where HK protesters are fighting Mainland nationalists, each donning gear and uniform representative of their factions.

User Acquisition

• Chris Zukowski wants you to go deeper than just your game’s hook when promoting your game, and has come up with its « anchor », or « what makes your game familiar to prospective players ».
• The Untitled Goose Game was undoubtedly one of the main pop culture phenomena. Its publisher Panic put out a great trailer for the PS4/Xbox One release, highlighting a very specific behaviour of the players: hoarders who collect all items in the game to dump them in the lake. A great way to nod back to the community.
• Insightful Twitter thread full of Marketing lessons, the chief one being that Marketing emanates from your product, and good Marketing will never redeem a shitty product. An oft-forgotten lesson.
• The 4 biggest PR disasters of the year hit Blizzard, THQ Nordics, Borderlands and Stadia.
• If you’re making video ads for Facebook, you have likely read that most people are seeing them with the sound muted. This guide from Hubspot should help you maximising performance for silent video ads.
• Since Huawei devices can’t have Google software pre-installed, there is a new land of opportunities with their homegrown store, Huawei AppGallery. ASO Software Company TheTool has recently released a Beginner’s Guide to help you navigate AppGallery’s specificities when publishing your app.

Product Management

• Still conflicted about adding ads to your game, concerned it will hurt your player experience? 94% of mobile devs use them in their F2P games. Don't pass on potential revenue!
• To go above and beyond the classic listicle of best games of the year, GameAnalytics is taking an in-depth look at their picks, sharing learnings about what makes these games some of the best games.
• Working on an FPS? Josh Foreman (Descend 3, Red Faction) shares his process for designing maps for PvP FPS. A unique look at a designer’s and artist’s brain.
• There’s a nifty tool for calculating your Net Promoter Score, one of the North Star metrics for player satisfaction. Don’t forget to regularly ask your players if they’d recommend your game to their friends. (h/t Chris Zukowski)
• Why do people collect virtual items? Psychology concepts inherent to real-life collections can be loosely tied to virtual collections, with a few changes to fit digital economies.

One Last Sip

• While Amazon snatched exclusive rights to the Premier League in the UK for Prime Video, the broadcaster holding the rights for Russia didn’t like that fans were live-streaming games on Twitch, and is now suing the platform.
• AppOnBoard launched Buildbox, another game engine that’s for you if you have a great game idea and can’t (or won’t) code.
• There’s a match I didn’t expect to see: Playdead, creators of Limbo and Inside, have teamed-up with sex doll maker RealDolls to build a creepy collector figurine for Inside, « capturing the palpable thing that made Huddle so memorably disgusting ».
• LONG READ OF THE WEEK: The evolution, role, and impact of Radio Stations across Video Games’ history.
  • A little disappointed that there’s no mention of Alt-Frequencies, mentioned as one of the 15 best games of 2019 that you probably missed by US Gamer.
• Have you ever played a Zynga game? Change your password now!
• Tencent states that its MOBA-playing AI can beat 99.8% of human opponents. It would appear the times are gone when you had to play online for a real challenge.
• A Medical Game Jam was hosted in Paris in November, with two games standing out: King of Trial, raising awareness on consent before medical trials, and Utter Us which aims at « making the invisible visible » by having you fight diseases like infections, endometriosis, and fibroma inside a uterus.