A Look at the App Store - Octobers Numbers...

As part of Player XP’s October review process, we’ve been able to identify a number of key data points that we thought we would share with you so you too can see the changes in the market. This blog post will dive into Player XP’s reviews to identify the latest statistics, patterns and emerging trends within the Mobile Games Market. If you’ve got a game currently for sale or are about to release, this article is a must read.

Top Line Numbers

Of these 424,410 reviews, the 3 games that collected the most reviews are as follows…

Top Genre’s in October

Player XP can automatically detect characteristics inside games such as genres. We’ve taken those tags and have identified the top genre’s reviewed throughout October. It’s also worth noting that a single game can have multiple genre’s so therefore the percentages add up to greater than 100%.

The most notable change is at the top of the table where Platformer & Infinite Runner have had a major boost. This is down to the release of SMILE Inc which falls into these genres and has had over 16,000 new reviews this month, making it the second biggest game of the month in our charts.

Top Games Within The Top Genre’s

On top of looking at the top genre’s, we’ve also looked at the top games within the top 5 genres…

To see the top games throughout history, head over to Player XP’s Top Ranked Games page.

Most Discussed Topics

Finally, we’ve looked at the amount of times certain categories were talked about and how that’s changed since last month.

It’s worth mentioning that the amount of reviews complaining about game bugs and issues has dramatically increased. Most complaints went to Minecraft Pocket Edition which is still going strong since it was released nearly 4 years ago and was number 9 in this month’s chart with 4,337 new reviews.

Closely following Minecraft, Pokémon GO, which went down 1 position in the chart, also received a number of complaints in regard to Battery Saver, No Gps Signal & Minor Text Fixes. These complaints formed a quarter of all the reviews that came through to the game’s app store page for the month.

Summary

October’s retrospective clearly demonstrates the volatility of the mobile market. Any developer who believes that their game’s position as a popular title is secure, just doesn’t grasp the amount of change that can happen within a month. There are several big new releases and updates every month in the mobile game space, and if you don’t monitor their impact you’re open to being blindsided. In the space of a month several large upsets have occurred to the marketplace. For example, the most popular genre this month has been simulator games of which only 2 of the top 5 were in the top 5 last month. Also the data shows that two of the largest updates to come out this month have been received negatively enough to increase the total number of reviews talking about issues by 75%. Such a large increase shows how much impact a poor update can have to your player base.

All of the reasons behind these changes are available in the reviews, And if you don’t monitor these reviews, you’re effectively ignoring all those early warnings and unhappy players. This is going to contribute negatively to your churn and grant your competitors a chance to convert your players to their game.

2016 Report & Further Information

This data and more will be included in our ‘The Player’s View of the Market — 2016/2017’ industry report which will be available in the new year, for more information head to the Industry Reports page on Player XP.

To view the original version of this article, head over to Player XP's blog.