The best games and articles of 2015, and the games we can't wait for in 2016

The hottest articles of last week

• 5 2015 in Review: Space Ape's Simon Hade on ditching the UA funnel

  

  We ran a whole heap of features rounding up 2015, including interviews with a wealth of interesting people from within the mobile gaming world, and it looks like our readers were most interested in Space Ape's Simon Hade.

  2015 saw the launch of Space Ape's Rival Kingdoms, which Hade says led to a change in the company's business focus as "we focused on community building rather than a traditional performance marketing based user acquisition funnel."

  For 2016, Hade says "We're looking to hire 50 new employees in the next 12 months and want to maintain our reputation as the best place to work for the most talented developers who want to make mobile games for gamers."

  
  

• 4 The IAP Inspector's Top 5 player-friendly F2P mobile games of 2015

  

  Matt took over the role of In-App Purchase Inspector at the start of 2015, and, having cast his judgement on some of the biggest free-to-play games, took the time to reflect on which games he felt were the most player-friendly out there.

  There's a certain RPG flavour running through his choices, with KingsBlade, Stormblades, Storm Casters Ultra, and COLOPL Rune Story all receiving his biggest stamp of approval, alongside strategy title Rival Kingdoms.

  The latter of these choices apparently knocks the strategy-based competition "into a cocked hat visually", a stunning turn of phrase which surely will tempt even the most cynical amongst you to have a read through his list.

  
  

• 3 2015 in Review: Our top 10 most read articles of 2015

  

  In one of the more meta twists of last week, our list of the top 10 most read articles of 2015 is also one of the most read articles at the start of 2016.

  There are some cracking articles to check out in there, with our behind-the-scenes of the making of both Candy Crush Soda Saga and Crossy Road present, as well as key trends we learned from various conferences in 2015.

  Taking the number one spot was another list, this time of the games we were excited about for 2015, which turns this whole thing into a messy time loop that I'm trying not too think too much about.

  
  

• 2 6 mobile games you should have played in 2015

  

  Some of our choices may have drawn flack from members of the gaming community, but no matter your feelings on certain games, these are the 6 that you really should have been playing in 2015.

  Whether it was the engaging RPG-battler Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes; the incredibly niche, but massively successful, Mobile Strike; or the mega-hit that no one could have predicted, Fallout Shelter, these games caught our attention as much as they did the general public.

  The reasons vary as to why they struck a chord, from interesting implentation of monetisation, to simply being a very enjoyable game, but they're all deserving of merit for some reason or another, as Jon explains within.

  
  

• 1 The 12 mobile games we're most excited about in 2016

  

  It's next door to impossible to predict what games are going to take off in the coming year, particularly when some of the best seem to spring up from nowhere, but that doesn't stop us from looking forward to some of them.

  There's a few gambles here in terms of games that will actually come out - Survivor Squad has been in soft launch an awfully long time, and Prison Architect has been pushed to the backburner by Introversion Software more times than we can count.

  But we know Dawn of Titans, Crashlands, and Micro Machines will make it out in the first few months of 2016, all of which look interesting for different reasons.

  As an aside, I personally have high hopes for Mini Metro, which just picked up four nominations at the IGFs with its minimalist subway management gameplay.