The biggest challenge is convincing the millions of players who are already invested in their favorite games to come and spend time in yours. If you are lucky enough to capture their attention at launch, you can lose them just as quickly as you gained them if you don’t have the right live events framework in place. 

Putting that framework together isn’t easy. The mobile market is incredibly competitive and there’s a growing number of AAA console and PC developers entering the fray. You’ve got hundreds of potential competitors to keep an eye on, thousands of live events to track, and constantly changing trends in the mobile market affecting gameplay mechanics, monetization and user acquisition. 

All of this might sound difficult, but it shouldn’t have to be. We launched the GameRefinery Live Events Tracker to provide an all-in-one platform that allows users to monitor their competitors and live events in real-time, get daily updates, and analyze the features and mechanics proving the most popular with players. 

Here’s everything you need to know about using the Live Events Tracker to get the analysis you need to build the best live events framework for your mobile games, no matter what genres you operate in. 

Using the Live Events Tracker for competitor analysis

Adding games to the Live Events Tracker 

The GameRefinery analysts analyze more than 100 games daily across PC, console, and mobile, and we’re always adding new games to the roster. Analysts are experts in the games and genres they report on, ensuring all updates are fully contextualized with all the information you could ever need. 

Updates are also supported with screenshots showing everything from character skins and ad implementation to IAP offers and general gameplay. This means you’ll always have a thorough understanding of what’s happening across the live events space without having to play the games yourself! 

When you first access the Live Event Tracker you can pick up the games you are interested in by clicking on ‘Edit Select Games’ button. If you’re unsure of which games to add, we’d recommend using the tabs at the top to filter games by their category, genre and/or subgenre. 

Building a list of games that share your genre can help you keep track of what your competitors are doing. Alternatively, you might want to build a list of games in a completely different category for live event inspiration. The choice is yours!

Navigating the Live Events Tracker

Once you’ve compiled a list of games to monitor, the Live Events feed will display live events in order of start times, with the most recent events at the top. Even if you’ve only selected a handful of games to monitor, you’ll likely have a lot to sift through. For example, selecting four games from the 4X category brought up more than 150 live events across two days! 

You’ve got several options when it comes to filtering this list down even further: 

Filter Events by Event Name

This is great if you already know the event name you want to track but aren’t sure when it took place or how to find it. Event names are displayed alphabetically according to the date range you have set in your calendar. 

Filter Events by Event Type 

Looking for monetization inspiration? Fancy a battle pass refresh? Or maybe you want to introduce new gameplay mechanics, such as guilds and minigames, but don’t know where to start? 

Filtering events by event type is a great way to get LiveOps inspiration and learn more about the gameplay mechanics and monetization features that are making the biggest impact on revenue and user acquisition. 

Filter Events by Event Duration

If you’re struggling to decide how long you should run specific event types for, filtering events by event duration is a great way of getting a feel for what your competitors are doing. If you’re planning a major anniversary event, try searching for 17-27 days or even 32+ days to see how other games have celebrated important milestones. 

Event duration provides even more analysis when it’s combined with the ‘event type’ filter. If you’re unsure whether two days is long enough to trial an IAP offer, filter events by selecting ‘monetization – IAP offer/bundle’ and the ‘two-day duration’ to see what else comes up. You can keep extending the event duration to get a better idea of the average time that most IAP offers and bundles run for. 

You can also use the ‘event stats’ tab to gauge the average and max duration of specific event types. 

Using the ‘Game Calendars’ Tab to roadmap LiveOps campaigns 

If you notice your daily revenue is down on specific days, your competitors might have a successful live events framework in place that’s pulling spend away from your game – maybe it’s a great IAP offer that’s taking place at the beginning of every week. 

You can use the ‘game calendars’ tab in the Live Events Tracker to reveal LiveOps roadmaps for your competitors, helping you make more informed decisions on when to launch specific events and features. It’s also a great way to understand how to interconnect events for further engagement, such as running smaller IAP events to support a larger event taking place across a long duration. 

The game calendars tab can help you: 

• Track the duration of specific live events 
• Check how many live events are running at once across specific time periods 
• Get daily updates on the most popular IAPs and how much they cost 
• Identify gaps in the LiveOps calendars for your competitors by seeing which event types they aren’t running.
• Identify new event types introduced to the game

This makes the ‘game calendars’ tab a great way to plan your LiveOps framework, as you can gather insight that will help you understand the best time to launch events and dates to avoid if larger competitors are already dominating certain calendar dates with specific event types. The download and revenue % changes will also help you determine whether the events you’re analyzing were a hit with players. 

If you want additional insight into any of the live events displayed on the calendar, just click the event name to open the event description panel. This panel includes a detailed event synopsis with event mechanics and rewards (if relevant). 

Analyze trending features and gameplay mechanics 

While the ‘game calendars’ tab provides an overview of everything happening in one game, you can use the ‘compare events’ tab to get side-by-side comparisons. Updates are displayed down the left-hand side of the screen according to their event type, so this is a great way of finding out which event types are being used by your competitors the most, and where the gaps might be so you can introduce new event types into your own LiveOps calendar. 

While seeing the frequency of specific event types and their duration is useful, you also need to understand how much of an impact they’re making on revenue. This is where the’ event stats’ tab comes in, allowing you to filter event types by their popularity, revenue value, and revenue change. 

While the filters mentioned above provide a quick and easy way to see which event types are proving the most popular, you can get even more insight by clicking on the event types displayed on the left-hand side. 

The daily statistics can help you understand the best days to launch event types, such as IAP offers, while the performance view shows growth over time. If an event type is on an upward trend but you haven’t implemented it in your game yet, don’t hang around! Similarly, if an event type you implement is on the downtrend and you’ve noticed it isn’t engaging your users as much as it used to, it might be time to switch up your LiveOps strategy and replace it with something more popular. 

Using the GameRefinery Motivational Driver Framework to Improve Player Retention

The Live Events Tracker works best when combined with other elements of the GameRefinery platform, such as the Motivational Driver Framework. This framework can guide live event implementation, ensuring any new features you add align with your players’ motivations. Alternatively, you can use it to introduce new features that appeal to wider motivations to attract new players. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the GameRefinery Motivational Driver Framework, it’s a data framework that breaks down mobile game players into 12 motivations across six categories: social, mastery, management, expression, exploration, and escapism. You can find a complete overview of the framework in the link above, but in short, this framework reveals which motivational insights are aligned with specific genres and subgenres. 

Most games in the US market listed on the GameRefinery platform have a Motivational Driver Framework attached to them, which means you can quickly understand the player archetypes a game attracts. For example, 47% of Candy Crush players fall into the ‘Thinker’ archetype, a category of players who ‘enjoy playing games for the occasional brain teaser or other cognitive challenges to take their mind off other things.’

Looking at the player motivations for Candy Crush, we can see how they compare to the average player motivations for a match3 puzzler. Candy Crush taps into all of the motivations that players would expect from a match3 puzzler but introduces social PvP elements to appeal to players who are motivated by competition. 

With this knowledge, we can jump back into the Live Events Tracker, open up the filter tab, and select PvP competition to get a better idea of how Candy Crush is appealing to this player segment in its LiveOps calendar by using competitive race events, solo tournament leaderboards, and weekly contents. 

This is a great inspiration for traditional match3 puzzler developers who want to explore new live event features and developers in other genres who want to introduce new gameplay mechanics. You can also switch this and reverse it; if race events are growing in popularity amongst match3 puzzlers, racing game developers could break up their core gameplay loop by introducing match3 minigames. 

Pay attention to the Motivational Driver Framework when using the Live Events Tracker. It can open up new ways to interpret and integrate live event data. 

Top tips for building better live events 

While GameRefinery’s Live Events Tracker provides a complete 360 view of the most significant live events taking place in the mobile market, we wanted to share some additional tips to support you on your LiveOps journey. 

Give players new ways to experience the games they love

Player retention is a constant challenge in a market as competitive as mobile gaming. Use your live events framework to trial new gameplay mechanics and monetization features to see what sticks. Use the Live Events Tracker to guide the features you add and if you manage to find a hit with a limited-time event, consider bringing it back in the future or introducing it as a permanent gameplay mode. 

Decide how to measure the ROI of your live events 

Of course, you’re always going to be mindful of download figures and daily revenue, but have you considered the other ways to measure the ROI of a live event? If you want to expand into new markets, use the Live Events Tracker to analyze live events from games in your target markets, and consider how you could introduce these gameplay elements into your own live events framework. 

Make sure you pay close attention to player sentiment during your live events too. While it’s easy to know whether or not a new update has been a hit from revenue spikes, you should also monitor community channels such as forums and Discord servers to get a better idea of how our players are responding to events – especially if you’re introducing new gameplay mechanics that might be considered outside of your core gameplay loop. 

Be careful not to eat into your own revenue streams with too many events running simultaneously

While running multiple events at once is a great idea, you need to consider pricing structures and duration so you don’t end up competing against yourself. The Live Events Tracker can reveal which IAPs in other games are proving popular (as well as revealing their price points) and give you an idea of the ‘sweet spot’ when it comes to running multiple events. 

Don’t overlook social elements

A growing number of traditionally single-player games are adding social elements into their live events framework. As well as appealing to the motivations of players who like social gameplay, social events are a great way of improving player retention and fostering a community around your game. You can use the Live Events tracker to get an overview of which social features, such as guilds, hangout areas, and co-op gachas, are proving popular. 

For more support with your Live Events framework, make sure you check out our free webinar: Maximizing Player Retention and Engagement with Live Events 

The post How to Build Better Live Events with the GameRefinery Live Events Tracker appeared first on GameRefinery.

To start this post, I think it would be great to go back to one of our blog posts from 2019 Casual Games Are “Guilding Up,” where we talked about the upcoming trend concerning guild-related features in the casual space.

“Traditionally, guild mechanics have been a “must-have” feature in many midcore genres, such as strategy and RPG games. Casual games have, however, tended to avoid them, relying on much lighter social elements. However, now the tide seems to be turning, and casual games have started to adopt guild mechanics at an increasing pace.”

Casual Games are “Guilding Up” blog post (July 2019)

This is something we wrote back in 2019, and if we check the current trend as of NOW, we can see a significant shift in two years. If you “missed the train” on guild mechanics, maybe that could have been avoided by utilizing GameRefinery’s data.

This is, of course, just an example of one feature, but there are others as well. We’ve seen features that have been typically utilized only in midcore games making their way to more casual games, so there might be more than one feature trend on the rise that could be beneficial to keep an eye on. For example, there is a particular feature that Royal Match and Homescapes, plus just a couple of other games in the casual top 200 grossing have, but in the midcore space, the situation is vice versa. Can you guess the feature from this example? (I’ll give you a hint, it’s something to do with guilds.)

Or maybe there’s something that could be added to your game’s monetization that you haven’t utilized yet, but it could be your golden ticket?

Are you missing out on the best IAPs for casual games?

If you feel that creating the most effective monetization feature set is something you’re having trouble with or just want to find out the best IAPs for casual games, we’ve got you covered. Our Market Explorer tool is the best place to see the most utilized features among the top 200 grossing casual games. You can check it yourself by filtering the data with the monetization features. You’ll find that it’s easy to check out these things, for example:

1. What are the most utilized monetization features based on popularity

2. Which features are just gaining popularity, but they could already work in your game

Finding out what features could contain hidden potential is easy by checking the “Overall Popularity” from the point of view of what is not utilized much yet. You would be amazed what you can find out when comparing casual vs. midcore games. For instance, a good place to start is to go over the top 200 sustained grossing games in casual and midcore categories and compare how these games differ in feature utilization. As guilds were not a big part of casual games some years ago, maybe you can find something interesting from midcore that would fit in with casual games as well?

Find the hidden potential in monetization

These tips mentioned above can also be utilized to research the hidden potential among monetization features by using the Market Explorer tool. There are many features that work extremely well together, so it would make sense to try to find out what those features are, right?

Let’s have a look at the top 200 grossing casual games to see if we can find some hidden potential among monetization features.

As we can see, there are indeed several games that have implemented some sort of gacha into the game, but the “Bulk discount gacha” feature is not really utilized in the top 200 sustained grossing casual space. At least as of now.

So to wrap things up, there are many things that you need to know if you are moving to a casual scene AND a lot of things that you can do if you already are there, but in both cases, having access to data can help you find the hidden potential of your game. If you don’t yet have access to our data and therefore could not click the links, please feel free to schedule a short call with me, and we can check out the data together.

If you enjoyed reading this post, here are a few more you should definitely check out:

• Analyzing Game Updates to Build Even Better Content for Your Game
• From Competitors Tab to Market Explorer – Supercharge Your Feature Research

The post Are You Missing Out on Feature Opportunities in Casual Games? appeared first on GameRefinery.

Now we will dig a bit deeper into the market shares of these new subgenres by looking at our data of iOS IAP revenue to find out what is happening in different markets revenue-wise. We will be looking at data from Q1 2021 and compare it with Q1 2020.

Market share in the three biggest markets: US, China, and Japan

When comparing these subgenres to the overall revenue and the most popular subgenres in these markets, the market shares are not grand. For comparison, in Q1 2021, the biggest subgenre shares were the following:

• Match3 puzzle made a $202.40m revenue in the US market
• Turn-based RPG had a $279.42m revenue share in the Japanese market
• MMORPG had a $468.76m revenue share in the Chinese market

Nonetheless, even if these seven subgenres are not occupying the highest level of the market share when comparing these to the overall revenue and the other most popular subgenres in these markets, they still have market share value and include interesting games that reflect ongoing or potential upcoming trends. Let’s look at those a bit further.

Other Casino

One of the most significant market shares from these subgenres comes from the Other Casino in the Chinese market. These include games such as the so-called “fish-shooting games” or Chinese mahjong games.

Interestingly, the Other Casino subgenre in the Chinese market contains the highest number of games in the top-grossing 500 compared to the number of games in other markets. That is 22 games in total, while other markets had games ranging from 1 to 9 when looking at all of these subgenres. The Other Casino is heavily leaning on Chinese markets, as only Japan had a few games from this subgenre (around 0.7% of the overall revenue), whereas the US had none. This is naturally due to the fact that the mahjong games in this subgenre are more often better known in Japan than in the West. Most of the “mahjong-games” in the West are “Mahjong Solitaire”-types of experiences, which are quite different from the original mahjong.

In Japan, Other Casino includes one mahjong game called 雀魂 -じゃんたま-, which has been growing quite a lot during one year ($4.23m). Q1 2020, it had a revenue of $235,871, and in Q1 2021 it had already almost doubled the amount landing on revenue of $4.47m.

Casual Casino

The casual casino is the most successful subgenre of the new subgenres in the Western markets. In the US, it occupies 1.93% of the revenue. When we look at the highest revenue games in this subgenre, Coin Master is gaining the highest revenue and is the only game in this subgenre that has entered the top-grossing 500 in the Japanese market as well.

Sovereign Games

When we look at sovereign games, it can be noticed that Japanese markets are strongest in this area, with 1.02% of revenue coming from this subgenre. However, it does not differ that much from the US market (0.76%), but more so from the Chinese market (0.33%). In the actual value of the markets, differences are somewhat similar, not too distinctive. Additionally, the amount of games is not much higher or lower than in other markets, but they gain slightly more revenue in Japan.

Merge Games

When comparing Merge games, we can see that this subgenre is much more popular in the Western markets (around 1%) compared to China and Japan (about 0.1%). The same games occupy pretty much all of the markets from East to West: Merge Dragons! in Japan and China, and Evermerge and Merge Mansion as a plus in the Western markets, these being the big three of this subgenre. Two of the top three games by revenue in most of the markets, Merge Mansion and Evermerge, were both published in 2020, so merge as a subgenre is still relatively fresh in the market.

Bubble Shooters

Japanese and US iOS market has some Bubble Shooter games, whereas this subgenre has not reached Chinese tastes, meaning it has no Bubble Shooter games at all in top-grossing 500. Bubble Shooter games make the highest revenue in the US iOS market, but these have come down a bit during the last year.

Asymmetric Survival

Asymmetric survival is making revenue quite equally in different markets. It is the same games that are occupying all of these markets: Identity V and Among Us. However, the Chinese market holds a wild card in this genre, as 猫和老鼠 (Tom & Jerry) is an asymmetric survival game in its top-grossing 500 list.

If we compare Q1 2021 and Q1 2020 revenue changes, it can be seen that in the US, asymmetric survival has grown during this year from 0.05% to 0.4%. NetEase’s Identity V has been growing its revenue during the past year in the US market (from 0.05% to 0.25% market share), and it shows in the growth of asymmetric survival’s revenue.

Tower Defense RPG

Tower Defense RPG shows a somewhat similar trend, as, for example, Arknights is occupying all of the markets, and the Battle Cats occupy the Western markets.

However, Arknight has been diving quite low in its revenue in the Asian markets. In the Japanese markets, Arknight, which is the only Tower Defense RPG game in the top-grossing 500, has seen a high revenue drop of $4.42m when comparing Q1 2021 and Q1 2020. This game has met a similar fate also in the Chinese market, with a $6.26m revenue drop. Same as Japan, it’s the only game from this subgenre.

Summary

We hope that this market share analysis of the new subgenres has given you more insight into the smaller subgenres of our genre taxonomy. We here at GameRefinery want to update our genre taxonomy regularly to reflect the evolving mobile gaming market to provide our users a tool to understand their competitors and their target audience. If you’re interested to know more about how we lay down the rules of our genre taxonomy, check out our original post on our current taxonomy, New Genre Taxonomy and Why We Need It.

The post GameRefinery’s New Subgenres – Current Market Positions in the Three Biggest Mobile Game Markets appeared first on GameRefinery.

Let’s take a look at Rise of Kingdoms in this example. To give some extra insight, I’ll add some personal comments on this one from a player’s perspective.

So first things first, you’ll find the history for an individual game by clicking the Update History button on the game’s overview page.

Just scrolling down can reveal a great deal of information about the game’s updates, such as how often developers introduce new content to the game. Moreover, going through the individual updates can give you more insights into the game and even the genre if you spend some time reading and diving deeper into them.

So what can we find from here? Regarding Rise of Kingdoms, there are a couple of interesting executions on particular Seasonal Events that include a “mini Battle Pass,” so let’s take a look at them!

Now, what you can see here from these update analyses is that this event-related “mini Battle Pass” has a Premium Currency layer. Moreover, during the Lanterns of Togetherness event, there was even a third layer that required you to purchase Premium Currency before you could get it.

The 7000 Gems required to purchase the layer are obtainable for free to play but would take about two months or so. Therefore, these updates include some attractive “incentives” for IAPs to get the gems.

Buying the gems via IAPs would be around 20€-30€, and the duration of this “mini Battle Pass” is around 7-days (usually). The progression is seen quite fast regarding this short duration, and if you are active, you might start with the free layer, BUT once noticing that the potential rewards keep stacking up, it is really tempting to buy the premium layer. For example, I’ve spent some money to get these layers as they offer some great rewards for being active for the duration of the event.

Now, you might be interested to know how the event eventually performed, so let’s check out how the Lanterns of Togetherness event did.

It seems that the event went pretty well when checking the iOS estimations. Oh, and it’s good to remember that this specific update had the third layer mentioned above.

But as I said, these updates include some other well-designed stuff, too, so you should definitely dig into the comments and implementations more deeply. I highly recommend checking out Rise of Kingdoms Update History, as there is a lot of excellent content for the players.

Want to see how you could use GameRefinery service in your development? Feel free to schedule a call!

If you enjoyed reading this post, here are a few more you should definitely check out:

• How player motivations & archetypes can help you with your key audiences
• Using data & personal skills to make unique features
• Make Feature Research Easy with Game Update Impacts

The post Analyzing Game Updates to Build Even Better Content for Your Game appeared first on GameRefinery.

This is where the fun and grinding begins.

Conan, what is best in LiveOps?

GameRefinery’s Market Share offers an opportunity to study the historical performance of all the top-grossing games. Who have become rulers and who have been erased from the top-grossing ranks. The most visible data is the historical percentage share of each game per sub-genre which will help us find the necessary clues to understand the magic recipe of their LiveOps. These percentage changes can be used to pinpoint the games which have been excelling in their LiveOps through content & adding features over a set period of time.

In this tips & tricks article, we’ll take a look into the 4X strategy sub-genre. As the old saying goes,” numbers don’t lie” we’ll take the top-performing games and their one year of LiveOps under the microscope. We will do a basic analysis of how many updates they’ve had and what was included. The latest Game Update Impacts update makes analyzing content even easier now! Note that we are counting the updates and their types. To dwell deeper into the specific update content is saved for a future article.

Setting time periods in Market Share

As mentioned, we’ll be taking a look into the 4X strategy subgenre – We can set the scope to genre-level to see how different subgenres have developed over time.

At this point, we will also mark ”Show subgenre share” checked as we want to focus purely on all 4x strategy games out there. As the latest full quarter data we have from 2021 is from Q1 at the time of writing, it’s natural that we set it as a starting point. Further, we set our comparison point to 2020 Q1 giving us one year of progress & market share data available.

We can now focus on the top 10 performing 4X strategy games and see both their revenue & download share over the past year.

Six games out of ten have increased:

• State of Survival: Zombie War – 6.57% increase
• Top War: Battle Game – 6.18% increase
• Puzzles & Survival – 4.69% increase
• Evony – 3.94% increase
• West Game – 1.13% increase
• Mafia City: War of Underworld – 0.78% Increase

To keep this article short and simple, we’ll focus on the three biggest growers: State of Survival: Zombie War, Top War: Battle Game, and Puzzles & Survival.

Game Overview Pages

Each of our three games has an update history tab on their game overview page. In this tab, we list all the updates that have been added since the game’s launch. Our definition of an update is linked to the iTunes client update.

State of Survival: Zombie War

We couldn’t fit all the game updates between Q1 2020-Q1 2021 in one picture, but you can access State of Survival’s update history in the GameRefinery service here.

Let’s do the math!

Updates between Q1 2020-Q1 2021: 67

• Updates where new features were introduced: 3
• Updates where existing features were updated: 21
• Updates including events: 34
• Updates including content: 40
• Updates including seasonal: 12
• Updates including fixes: 63

Top War: Battle Game

We couldn’t fit all the game updates between Q1 2020-Q1 2021 in one picture, but you can access Top War’s update history in the GameRefinery service here.

Updates between Q1 2020-Q1 2021: 162

• Updates where new features were introduced: 4
• Updates where existing features were updated: 3
• Updates including events: 21
• Updates including content: 61
• Updates including seasonal: 5
• Updates including fixes: 153

Puzzles & Survival

We couldn’t fit all the game updates between Q1 2020-Q1 2021 in one picture, but you can access Puzzle & Survival’s update history in the GameRefinery service here.

Updates between Q1 2020-Q1 2021: 11

• Updates where new features were introduced: 1
• Updates where existing features were updated: 6
• Updates including events: 3
• Updates including content: 8
• Updates including seasonal: 1
• Updates including fixes: 2

Summary

In conclusion, Market Share can be used to easily identify games improvements in performance and offer immediate access to Game overview pages. As our analysts are going through the updates, we also take as many screenshots and write analyst comments of what was included.

To summarize the above findings:

167 updates out of a total of 240, 67% included events and content, and we have screenshots available for these updates. Surprisingly not many of the games added new features as there were eight features added in total. Existing feature updates (Battle Pass, LiveOps features, etc.) accounted for 78% of the feature updates we were able to analyze! Puzzles & Survival was the last to join the party as it was released in August 2020, so keep that in mind when taking a look into its updates.

As one of our users said, success is only one side of the coin. It’s also crucial to take a look into the games that have not fared that well to identify and dissect successes and understand failures.

The post Road to LiveOps – Using Market Share to Analyze Top-Grossing Games in the Same Subgenre appeared first on GameRefinery.

This if something is one of the most crucial questions as it helps product owners & designers to:

1. Prioritize right features
2. Implement those features

We’ve always guided our users through five step programs in our service:

1. Market explorer – Find what features are popular out there in the market
2. Compare Games – Find what makes your hand-picked core competitors tick when dissected by +250 individual features we track here at GameRefinery
3. Update Impacts – How adding individual feature changes impacted games KPIs
4. Implementation examples – How those features have been implemented in
5. Game Analyzer – Creating your own roadmaps to project how the game would look like, say after a quarter

In this article, we will solely focus on step 1, the Market Explorer, as there is a neat trick within your own game’s game overview page’s competitors tab which takes Market Explorer comparison to a completely new level.

In this use case we will be using my personal favorite, RAID: Shadow Legends.

Remember what Flint from GI Joe had to say:

Competitors tab

The competitors tab on each game overview page is an instant way how our users can immediately identify the core competitors. We take two things into account when we list games in the competitors tab:

1. Game’s position in our genre taxonomy
2. The core, meta & gameplay defining mechanics

Using the competitors tab, you do not need to browse through app stores to find similar games and finally confirm their status as a competitor after playing them. Let the GameRefinery algorithm do the work for you!

RAID: Shadow Legends‘ competitors tab already shows us few games which really stand out and can be considered core competitors.

To the Market Explorer!

The real saving grace here is the orange Show In Market Explorer button, as it allows us to immediately create two segments: One for our loved Raid and the other for all the competitor games.

When we move to the features data tab, we can immediately begin seeing some of the features Raid has what the competitors don’t have and vice versa.

From the get-go example, we can see that Raid does not have Promotional collaboration events, but 53% of the competitors do.

Let us begin expanding the two segments with two more segments:

• 3rd segment – All top 200 grossing RPG-genre games – Ps. Raid & competitors belong to this genre!
• 4th segment – All new RPG-genre games which have been released since May 2020!

Setting up these segments is very straightforward! We simply click Create New Segments and fill in our requirements per segment!

• For our 3rd segment, we select RPG-genre and limit range by grossing rank
• For our 4th segment, we also select RPG-genre, but this time we’ll use days since release to limit the time frame to one year.

Now when looking into the data points, we begin seeing interesting trends and popularities of certain features. Let’s take Battle Pass as an example:

It seems that our Raid does not have battle pass BUT:

• 32% of the closest competitors do have it implemented in – Orange color
• 57% of the top 200 grossing games have this feature – Purple color
• 43% of the games which were released in the past year have this feature implemented. What is even more eye-catching about this segment is that 20% of top-grossing games released in the past year have Battle Pass implemented.

And this was only one of the +250 features we track.

Seeing is always believing so click here to access the segments we created for Raid: Shadow of Legends here.

Summary

Competitors tab and show in Market Explorer button is a quick and easy way to begin dissecting your own game. If your game is not yet analyzed in the platform, you can always suggest us to take a peek under the hood so you can immediately identify your competitors.

As demonstrated in this article, the real beauty of Market Explorer lies in its versatility. In no time, we were able to expand our original segment with additional queries, which gave a completely new insight into how our game fits the market, what are the features our core competitors have, and the latest released games. If you’ve been participating in my onboarding sessions, you might remember me saying that Market Explorer is a never-ending rabbit hole with multiple ways to dissect the market and how your game fits in.

So now that we’re explored what features are popular out there in the market, you’re ready to move on to Compare Games and Game Update Impacts steps in your feature research!

The post From Competitors Tab to Market Explorer – Supercharge Your Feature Research appeared first on GameRefinery.

Let’s see if we can see anything that might be useful for us if we look at game updates from the past six months in the RPG genre and filter them by the feature “Number of different characters.” Perhaps there are some combinations that we can take note of and utilize in our next update or simply learn from for our game.

Game Update Impacts is a quick way to have access to this kind of data. With a few clicks, you have already filtered the updates with genre/sub-genre and the feature by utilizing your criteria and needs. But how should we proceed in this use case? Well, what I’ve now moved to do is to map out some of the features I did find interesting from all the updates I saw with my selected criteria, and here’s what I’ve learned:

Of course, each update does include a “Number of different characters,” but a lot of the updates also have been tied to Non-recurring live events, Gachas, and Special rewards from Live Events.

Furthermore, Game Update Impacts allows me to dive deeper into specific updates of the games to learn more about how they did implement certain features and what sort of impact they had.

For example, we can first look at the Genshin Impact update from the high level and then dive a bit deeper into it, read analyst comments + check out the implementation examples of the update. By doing this for a couple of the updates you’re interested in, you get a good idea of how they are utilizing certain combinations of the features in these updates. And if you’d be interested in asking more, there’s always the option to reach out to us with the chat function for some more detailed questions.

This is a good jump point to our Drive-Up Your Revenues with Seasonal Events article, which goes into a bit more detail about these live events, and gives you further ideas on how to leverage GameRefinery’s data. Now, at this stage in our use case, we arrive at the same conclusion with our research as Erno does in the referred blog post:

“By implementing a combination of features including event-specific currency, seasonal gachas, unique game modes, and collaborations, you’ll be significantly increasing your chances of growing revenues and even re-engaging lapsed users looking for fresh content and brand new challenges.”

When introducing new characters, you’ll be increasing your chances of success by introducing them in a combination of certain features, such as live events.

If you enjoyed reading this post, here are a few more you should definitely check out:

• Analyze Game Update Impacts Even Better with Feature Updates and Changes
• Tips & Tricks – Walking through GameRefinery’s core functions for production
• How the right tools help save your time as a UI designer

The post Make Feature Research Easy with Game Update Impacts appeared first on GameRefinery.

As you’re likely aware, Apple’s current changes to IDFA present a massive challenge to the world of mobile game advertising and user acquisition, and our recently announced contextual advertising solution has been developed to overcome this very problem. Our partnership with Vungle and subsequent membership of the Post-IDFA Alliance means that we can use these innovative targeting capabilities to drive UA performance. This gives mobile game developers, and publishers access to a data-rich and highly integrated suite of tools to continually grow your user-base in this new privacy-focused landscape.

From your perspective, we’ll carry on exactly as we are as GameRefinery, but we’re now part of the Vungle family. You can expect our core service to continue developing and evolving to meet your ever-growing needs with even more insight into what makes a winning mobile game. Whether you’re a free or premium customer, all the things you know and love in our service will remain the same.   

With Vungle’s data, knowledge and resources behind us, we’ll be able to expand our offering and develop even better and more effective solutions to meet your ever-growing needs. We can also leverage Vungle’s global presence to have even closer contact with our customers in more countries, meaning better service than ever before. 

I appreciate you still may have some questions, which we have tried to address in this FAQ. 

We sincerely value your continued support and feedback, which has made all of this possible. 

Markus Råmark,

CEO, Gamerefinery

FAQ

What does Vungle do? 

Vungle is one of the world’s biggest mobile advertising networks. The company specialises in helping game and app advertisers to reach, acquire, and retain high-value users worldwide. Vungle does this through in-app experiences that are driven by data, insight and great creativity. Vungle’s data-optimized ads run on over 1 billion unique devices to drive engagement and increase returns for publishers and advertisers ranging from indie studios to powerhouse brands, including Rovio, Pandora and Microsoft. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices worldwide in London, Beijing, Berlin, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, New York and now Helsinki.  

Why have you decided to be part of Vungle? 

There’s a LOT of things that make sense by joining forces with Vungle. One of the main benefits is to help Vungle’s network deliver much better-targeted advertising. As you may be aware, recent changes to Apple’s IDFA as part of iOS14 and an increase in privacy means that app users must opt-in to be tracked. If a user opts out, then it means that it is almost impossible to serve them contextually relevant advertising. Our recently announced Data Enrichment Solution has been developed to overcome this problem. Because we track 600+ data points per app, with 160k+ apps analysed today, we know a huge amount about each game. This data-led insight will give Vungle’s customers the ability to serve highly relevant advertising to their prospects. This capability will now be part of the Vungle advertising network, meaning that you can now grow your userbase using our unique and detailed insights. This overcomes many of the problems that IDFA removal is presenting. Ultimately, Vungle can now provide a full-service platform for monetisation, user acquisition and market insights. Our data brings deep contextual data sets that provide new and innovative targeting capabilities to Vungle’s platform, driving UA performance in a privacy-focused landscape.

What are the main advantages for GameRefinery in this acquisition? 

There’s a lot of upsides to this deal. Firstly, we now have the power of Vungle behind us. This means more resources that can go into making our platform bigger and better. Also, because Vungle has an international presence in several countries, we can be closer to our customers and service them better. Finally, because Vungle has a load of expertise in helping game developers grow and monetise their user base, we can start to share more insight with you on the best ways to do this.

Will I see any changes to the GameRefinery service? 

The GameRefinery service will continue to operate in precisely the same way as before. You can expect an ongoing roadmap of new features and improvements, and with Vungle behind us, you can expect even bigger and better things than before!

Will there be changes to the pricing or the FREE tier? 

No. Pricing will remain the same for the time being (but is always subject to review). There are no immediate changes to the FREE tier and want to ensure that now and in the future it provides a compelling offering.

Will my login change – will I have to have a Vungle account? 

No. Your login will remain precisely the same for the foreseeable future. If anything is likely to change then, we will always give plenty of notice.

What will happen to the GameRefinery name and branding?

The GameRefinery name and brand will continue, but we will be making small adjustments to let people know that we’re now part of the Vungle family.

The post GameRefinery Joins The Vungle Family appeared first on GameRefinery.

You will be able to find direct references for your own projects, and all of this is driven by GameRefinery’s massive archive of +50 000 individual feature screenshots.

But what kind of tools should you utilize to achieve this? Let’s go through 3 core sources of valuable data:

1. Visual Explorer
2. Implementation Examples
3. Game Overview pages

So, let’s dive into the potential use-cases for UI designing and utilize these tools along the way!

Atomize existing app icons in the market

With Visual Explorer, you can dissect app icons across the app store categories and GameRefinery’s own genre taxonomy. With this market data, you can see what driving attributes are, for example, for most downloaded games in your very own genre/sub-genre.

This allows you to save time in UI designing as you are able to guide your artistic decisions using up-to-date market data with a couple of clicks.

Here is an example of the most important attributes found in the top 200 downloaded Arcade genre games. This data helps you guide the requirements and give the art team instructions when you are creating the next six app icons for A/B testing.

You’re not only limited to this, but you can also find the most popular words, amount of words, and title lengths in your search criteria.

Tired of spending a lot of time browsing through the internet for possibly good reference cases?

With just 3 clicks, you can find all the reference pictures of your top competitors’ games and how they have implemented your upcoming feature in their game. Implementation examples allow you to search through the +250 features by filtering them. From our massive database, you will find exactly what you are looking for, and needless to say, it saves a lot of your time.

This example shows you how top 5 grossing RPG games have implemented their Battle Pass plans.

The cool part of all the implementations that you can find from our system is that you can create an unlimited amount of collection folders and add in as many screenshots as you wish. You can also create personal or team-wide collections for your upcoming features to have everything in the same place. This is a massive time saver for the communication between designers and UI designers.

Know your direct competitors

All the Game Overview pages include a full breakdown of the specific game: update history, app icon, feature, and implementation breakdowns. This gives you valuable information about how your core competitor(s) have implemented certain features in the games throughout the life cycles; this information you can utilize in your UI design.

In this example, we are checking out how PUBG’s Battle Pass plan has evolved from the feature UI design perspective throughout the version numbers.

Would you like to learn more and see the service in action? Book a demo here!

The post How the right tools help save your time as a UI designer appeared first on GameRefinery.