Live ops, hypercasual and artificial intelligence: Keeping up with the trends in 2024

• Zimad’s Kirill Zhukovsky and Anastasia Shilo gave their thoughts on the fast-changing industry
• IP collaborations can be successful with proper consideration, but common values are important

From live ops to AI, trends evolve quickly in the mobile games business and developers can either keep up or risk losing players to the next big thing…

Zimad’s CPO Kirill Zhukovsky and lead marketing manager Anastasia Shilo gave their thoughts on the fast-paced industry to GamesIndustry.biz, sharing the top trends in mobile game development right now, and offering strategies to retain audiences through such frequent shifts.

According to the pair, casual and midcore are increasingly popular genres to develop in while hypercasual has seen less and less enthusiasm - an unsurprising switch when hybridcasual generated 800% more revenue per user than its predecessor last year.

Careful with the collabs

IP collaborations have long been an effective avenue towards building up an audience in mobile gaming, but Zhukovsky and Shilo have warned against careless collaboration. Instead, team-ups should be "carefully planned" with thorough assessments of audience relevance and common values.

IP-based events reliant on live ops will be an increasingly important trend, according to the pair, who expect to see more social components and narrative elements in the future.

Equally, a game based on a popular pre-existing IP isn’t guaranteed for success even if it gets an early surge in downloads from fans: "It’s important to remember that if the game itself is terrible, even the most popular IP won't save it."

On the development side, AI burst onto the scene at a whole new level last year, and has been used to streamline and accelerate the creation process. Zhukovsky and Shilo noted that, as a result, the number of games on app stores has increased considerably and now video game formats are in emergence as a result.

The tech can also be leveraged in ad creation, serving as a "gift" to indie devs without the budget or skillset to produce videos on the scale of the industry’s giants.

Navigating a saturated market

Zhukovsky and Shilo also noted that in the modern economic climate, investments have become more costly, loans are less readily available, and innovative ideas in the games industry are consequently rarer. While AI could present a cheaper way to innovate, instead many developers are focusing on "tried-and-tested and highly predictable" models.

"Looking back, it becomes apparent that there are significantly fewer daring and innovative experiments today," they reflected.

Even so, Virtuos’ Matthieu Cheynut shared with us his view that "innovation and differentiation" are more important than a big budget within a saturated market.