A new report by Azur Games dives into the trends of myriad genres in the mobile gaming world throughout 2022, from puzzle game strongholds to the rising popularity of the strategy genre.
Some analysts, Azur Games says, expect the market to fall by over six percent by the end of this year with the continued increase in player demands. User acquisition is becoming more difficult; competition is growing more fierce.
In today’s market, pumping out prototypes is no longer viable – something that rings especially true for indie devs.
Azur Analysis
Azur Games notes that choosing to make a game in a successful genre doesn’t guarantee a title’s success, but "it’ll certainly help increase its chances". There were five times more games released this year than last, though the number of player installs hasn’t seen much of an increase. Ultimately, this means the growing number of hypercasual games in the market is outpacing the audience.
Projects that have been around for years now also serve as great competition to a new hypercasual game, as demonstrated in only 15 percent of the top 300 games by install right now having released this year.
Azur Games brings attention to the fact that marketing campaigns aren’t always successful either, with makeshift prototypes unable to guarantee success in even 1 percent of cases. Of course, this makes things progressively more challenging for indie and solo devs.
Azur Games’ full stats by genre can be found here, but looking at a few examples, the popularity of the idle genre has grown notably. The top game by installs this year, Lifting Hero, was downloaded over 16 million times, and the top idle game by revenue, Eatventure, made $2 million.
In the puzzle genre, Stick Hero: Tower Defense managed more than 30 million downloads, meanwhile Bricks Breaker Quest was the highest earner at $695,000, showing the idle genre to be more financially successful this year.
Interestingly, strategy games saw popularity triple compared to the start of 2022.
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