Ohayoo News — November 2020
- China Market Update
1.1 Market Overview
In September, the total iOS downloads of casual games in China is 41.7 million with a 11% MoM increase rate, while the figure for mobile game market is 77.41 million with a 4% MoM increase rate. During the National Day holiday, the mobile game market reflected a positive outlook.
1.2 Game Trends
- Three new games first ranked top 10 on downloads list
- Internet Cafe Simulator, published by PapaBox, ranked #1 on Chinese downloads list in October. It combines the simulation and idle gameplay. During the National Day holiday, it adopted aggressive advertising strategy to gain users, which successfully helped the game.
- The fifth is Mr. Bone, adding the roguelike gameplay into casual shooting game, and it was officially authorized by Mr. Bone, a famous IP on Douyin with more than 5.92m followers.
- Idle flower, a money earning game, ranked #7 in October.
- Simulation gameplay has a popular trend
- Three games that are on downloads list have simulation gameplay. There are Internet Cafe Simulator (#1), Homescapes (#8) and Gardenscapes (#10). Besides, on incremental downloads list, Idle Prison (#4), Idle Ants (#5) and Foil Turning 3D (#6) are also simulation games.
1.3 Top Publishers
- Top publishers have been quite stable on the rankings for months
- Eight publishers maintain their top 10 rankings in October downloads list since July.
- The new publisher, PapaBox, gained 3.8% market share due to the game Internet Cafe Simulator, with a growth rate of 756%. However, this game accounts for 91% of PapaBox’s all downloads. Whether it can keep the leading position is mainly relied on one game.
- The downloads of top 10 publishers decreased mildly
- Top 10 publishers’ overall downloads is 14.41 million in October, with a 9% MoM increase rate, which is similar to the casual game market increase.
- However, the market share of top publishers was 34.6% in October, which continued to decline slightly compared with the 37.1% market share in September.
2.Ohayoo Update
2.1 Ohayoo Performance
- Ohayoo is the chart-topping publisher in China in October
Ohayoo reranked first on Chinese casual game publisher list, with a total downloads of 3.35 million, an increase of 16% from the previous month. With the outstanding performance of the hit, Pin Rescue, and a healthy game product portfolio, Ohayoo’s leading position is stable. In terms of market share, Ohayoo games accounts for 8% in October, 3.1% higher than the second publisher in China.
2.2 Case Study — Mahjong Supreme
Mahjong Supreme is a casual mahjong game that began to be promoted in mid-August. Since its promotion, it has ranked the top 7 free list and continues to remain in the top 20 on the IOS list. The user performance is excellent, and it directly brings considerable gains.
- Project establishment stage
- Start by understanding user attributes
- We first studied the most basic question: who is playing casual games and when do they play casual games? Through research, we found that casual game players often have no special reason or motivation when starting to play a game. Nearly half of the players are to enrich their leisure time. In terms of the playing time length, nearly 40% of the people said that “As long as I am bored, I play casual games.” Therefore, it is not difficult to see that the design goal of casual games is to allow players to obtain a pleasant gaming experience in a relatively short period of time.
- Category Choose — Focus on active time
- Mahjong, as a subcategory of chess and card games, has a large number of online players. The MAU of TOP 50 Mahjong games has reached 70 million. The users of chess and card games have good stickiness, and their active time is often long, laying a good foundation for advertising monetization.
Affected by the COVID-19, the needs of a large number of offline chess and card players have moved to online, and the proportion of total time spent by chess and card game users has soared from 31.4% in January 2019 to 44.1%.
- Version optimization stage
- Develop a game that players really like
- The first version submitted by the developers in the early days of the project was a Mahjong game combines money earning gameplay. However, the testing result was mediocre. After deep communication with the project team,we changed the thinking. The game is adjusted from the idea of reaping user value through money earning to providing players high-quality mahjong game experience. After the direction is determined, all game optimizations are carried out around this goal. The testing figures continue to soar, and finally reaches the best standard in the industry.
- Reduce difficulty to meet needs
- After understanding our user attributes, we have some simple tags for these users, ‘killing time’, ‘releasing stress’ and ‘finding excitement’. It can be seen that these players can’t experience too much setbacks, and they have strong needs for content and strong feedback.
- Through constantly optimizing the strategy of dealing and drawing cards, we have greatly reduced the difficulty of mahjong playing, making it easier for players to make a lot of moves in a short time.
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