![]() The reasons for this are the underlying characteristics of the Hypercasual segment. Yet despite the yearly record-breaking numbers, Deconstructor of Fun has been very skeptical about Hypercasual games. Hypercasual games continued their increasing popularity with its already tremendous installs soaring to new heights once again in 2020 peaking at 9.6B installs with over 50% growth YoY. ‘Save the Girl’ and ‘Pull Him Out’ have been Lion’s only two big successes last year but with ~140 and ~55 million downloads respectively these games have contributed to one-fourth of all of Lion Studios’ installs during last year. Instead of following the misleading advertising trends with a core game that looks nothing like the ad, Lion Games went full circle and launched not one but two games based on the most successful ad formats throughout 2020. ![]() Hypercasual Trend #2 Misleading Ads Turn into Actual Games This is in line with the current rise in popularity of games with the equally satisfying Merge mechanic in the puzzle genre. The more games base the cores of our games on hyper-satisfying mechanics, the more engagement we can expect from players simply interacting with the main game mechanic. What have we learned? Nothing new really. An exciting exception could be a slick hybrid featuring an UltraCasual core game, connected to a meaningful metagame with actual power progression. We don’t expect UltraCasual Games to come back with such furor in 2021, as we think that people can turn so much wood and slice so many cubes before ‘having seen it all’. Only ~37% of 2020’s UltraCasual downloads occurred during the last 6 months. Reaching the second half of the year however, the genre has cooled down and lost its novelty effect. Throughout the first half of 2020, Woodturning, Perfect Cream, ASMR Slicing among others made huge splashes, contributing most to the 73% rise in total downloads in the subgenre this year. With that in perspective, it is easy to realize the breadth of audience this genre serves worldwide and therefore its significance. And let us not forget about the massive ad revenues, which according to our estimates crossed 3 billion. Over 2020, YoY downloads for Hypercasual games went from 7.8B to a whopping 11.8B, continuing its double-digit growth rate from 2019 with +52% YoY. ![]() In fact, Hypercasual games alone made up for ~45% of 2019’s total download volume across all mobile games. While Hypercasual games account for less than 1% of the total IAP revenue of all Casual games, it drove well over half of all downloads for the category during 2019. And the Hypercasual publishers definitely deserve theirs after doubling the market size through unrivaled pace, innovation, and optimization. But one thing is for sure, we are giving credit where credit is due. So why are right this time around? Well, that will be up to you to decide. And don’t get us wrong, we at Deconstructor of Fun have written multiple posts detailing why the end is near only to be proven wrong by a massive margin. One of the most popular things during the past three years has been predicting the end of Hypercasual business model. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |