Ohayoo News — April 2021
Chinese Market Updates🗓
Along with the end of the Chinese New Year vacation comes the decrease in gamer’s time available to game, which resulted in obvious drops in downloads of many games. Compared to the download peak that occurred last month, the game market in China is getting back to normal and the casual game industry has stepped into a relative off-season.
It’s worth mentioning here that High Heels, a hyper-casual parkour game, is still growing regardless of the vacation being over. Powered by a hit song in Douyin, the game generated over 1 million downloads in a month following the end of the vacation.
Highlights✨
Female-oriented Parkour Games👠
Niche hyper-casual game genre: Female Oriented Parkour Game market is expanding
High Heels, a hyper-casual game targeting the female audience, has occupied a top place on the Top Free Chart globally since its launching on Jan.30th. Its content is quite unique and tailored for female gamers, the character, in marvelous shape, walks on a runway carrying the mission of collecting more high heels to get past the obstacles, making the gameplay easy for everyone to enjoy.
Hit song in Douyin helped High Heels go viral
The hit song I’m the Queen in Douyin matched High Heels perfectly and left a strong impression on the audience. As a female-oriented game, High Heels fits the song in an extremely interesting way, which attracted a larger and larger audience to try it out, and the game topped the rank eventually.
Three things to keep in mind to stand out among numerous hyper-casual games
- Among numerous parkour games, a suitable theme is a need to occupy a place in a competitive market.
- As pan-entertainment enjoys great popularity and a rise in female users, developers should pay more attention to the user’s real demand instead of blindly pursuing in-game actions and excitement like before.
- Content marketing and user acquisition empowered by short-form video sharing networks can be a direction for developers to obtain low-cost traffic in the future.
Hyper-casual Game Creation Guidelines with Analysis on Shortcut Run’s Blast🏃♂️
Shortcut Run, a top hit with amazing data performance: CPI: $0.09, D1: 46%
Shortcut Run, developed by OHM studio, adopts the “risk & return” mechanism and vertical stack with horizontal controls for the first time and was successful with the test, surpassing Among Us, which has been Top 1 for a long period of time, reaching №1 on the Top Chart in the US. A great balance between difficulty and rewards along with the creative ending of each level is the key to Shortcut Run’s success.
Hyper-casual game creation guides by Voodoo
Keep in mind that the potential audiences of hyper-casual games are different from typical gamers in which case the following suggestions are valuable for game creation:
- Make the core gameplay more comprehensible
- Deliver intuitive feelings about the game to the audience with SNS Ads
- Remove unnecessary art resources to keep the art simple and clear
- Fragment the game with more levels to raise gamers’ satisfaction
- Adopt new technology to design new game mechanisms and experience
- Balance the difficulty to ensure more rewards for gamers
- Empower the game with a deeper system that allows gamers to choose a different difficulty, granting them the chance to take the balance between risk and rewards
Game Trend🔥
Games Designed on Hot Trends in Social Media Have Great Potential to Go Viral📱
High Heels’s success in China is greatly attributed to its perfect match with the hit song I’m the Queen on Douyin, a leading short-form video platform in China. Likewise, Watermelon Merge gained popularity early this year because it caught the trendy topic “Watermelon eater”, which refers to bystanders who know nothing about what is going on. The two games’ getting to top hits owe much to referral communication among gamers, which brought much more downloads than that from paid ads, showing the important role social media plays in gaming promotion. Therefore, it’s a good way for developers to take trendy topics from mainstream social media platforms like Douyin, Weibo, Wechat, as a reference when designing new games to fully utilize the power of referral communication among gamers themselves.
“Match + X” Games Collaborated with Existing IPs are Getting More Popular🍬
Since the market potential of “Match + X” has been demonstrated by Project Makeover in the US, Japan and Korea, more games under such genre are dominating the casual game market in Japan. LINE: Disney Tsum Tsum and BT21 POP STAR, two Match + X games are both ranking high in the top casual game download list in Japan. One of them has Disney elements implanted in it while the other is collaborating with a top boy group BTS, attracting a large group of IP fans to play the games. Merge games could effectively generate revenue from such IP collaboration campaigns because of its great feasibility to replace original in-game elements with IP images.
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