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How to choose the right genre for your mobile game?

Which trends are the hottest right now? Which direction is the market moving? What trends can be found within specific genres? To answer these questions, we analyzed 1500 games present on the US Grossing TOP-500 during the lat year

Kirill Razumovskiy, Blogger

June 5, 2018

1 Min Read
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Which trends are the hottest right now? Which direction is the market moving? What trends can be found within specific genres? To answer these questions, we analyzed 1500 games present on the US Grossing TOP-500 of Google Play and App Store from April 2017 to April 2018.

Genre Popularity

The diagram shows the distribution of genres in US Grossing TOP-500 list in April 2018 (cumulatively for two stores).

  • More than half of the top is occupied by Battler, Strategy, Casino and Puzzle games. This situation has not changed in years, and there are no reasons to expect it to change in the near future.

  • The top is occupied by more complicated games. 96% of the top grossing games unite complicated gameplay and a wide range of mechanics. All the "simple" games, except for a few representatives of the Action genre, are Arcades.

Genre Dynamics

Among the 1500 games we analyzed, we identified those which rose on the list and those which lost their positions over the year. Here is the genre percentage for both the former and the latter.

  • The popularity and profitability of Action, Casual and RPG games is increasing. The percentage of these genres among the games that are rising is larger than among the ones that are going down.

  • Puzzle, Strategy and Family genres are represented by numerous old games that are slowly losing their positions; successful newcomers are few and far between. This might be explained by the fact that new games in these genres offer nothing drastically new to players, opting instead to copy the gameplay from market leaders.

Source: Playliner Genre Trends Report (April 2018)

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