Today we continue the huge history of mobile games.
Mobile market now
The mobile games market is developing so fast that, according to Newzoo forecasts, by 2021 it will turn into an industry with an income of one hundred billion dollars, while the profit from conventional video games will somehow exceed thirty-two billion. The incredible amount of money that revolves around the mobile market attracts more and more developers.
Due to the huge amount of content on Google Play and the App Store, it can be difficult to find a worthwhile game. This is the main problem when there are hundreds of clones around with almost identical icons and names. The easiest way to understand all this is to identify the key players in the mobile market.
Perhaps the first company whose name comes to mind when mentioning mobile games is Gameloft, a French studio that appeared in 1999. At the beginning of the two thousandth, she was remembered for titles under Ubisoft licenses. However, in the future, the studio decided to focus on its own franchises, such as the Asphalt arcade racing series or Modern Combat first-person shooters.
Now you can find 51 games from Gameloft on Google Play. They have shooters, strategies, slashers, urban planning simulators and much more. The main problem is that all these games are free, which means sooner or later you will have to decide whether to pay for a slightly more comfortable gameplay.
In terms of the number of games released, another French studio that has grown rapidly in recent years, Voodoo, can compete with Gameloft. No matter how bad a reputation she has in the hardcore community, you can’t ignore the numbers: more than a billion downloads and hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly profits.
Voodoo managed to capture the trend for the simplest mobile games and raise it to the absolute, releasing dozens of hyper-casual games. In Helix Jump or Hole.io you can safely play with one finger while riding on public transport — there are no complicated mechanics or plot in Voodoo games, only simple gameplay and advertising.
Speaking of casual games, it should be noted the Russian studio Playrix, founded in 2004. During its existence, the company has released only four games: Gardenscapes, Homescapes, Fishdom and Township. The first three games are built around the mechanics of “three in a row”: you pass the levels, and with the points you get for this, you rebuild a garden, a mansion or a fish house.
Township is an urban planning simulator in which an important role is given to the development of your own farm. A simple gameplay and a nice picture turned out to be enough for the founders of the studio to become billionaires, and Playrix was in the top of mobile developers.
Playrix is similar in its approach to another company that has made a name for itself on “match3” — King. The main game of the studio is Candy Crash Saga, but the company has a dozen more similar games. According to the latest data, players spend an average of four and a half million dollars a day playing Candy Crash Saga.
Supercell continues the theme of popular games with huge revenue, which in 2018 became the first publisher whose two games separately brought in more than two billion dollars. These strategy games are Clash of Clans and Clash Royale. In the first, the player builds a base, pumps troops and attacks other players.
In Clash Royale, the construction of buildings was removed, but CCG elements were added — the player collects a deck of creatures and fights with the enemy in real time. In addition to these two games, Supercell has another Boom strategy, Hay Day Farm and Brawl Stars Mobile Overwatch.
We have come to the current generation of mobile games. But we will tell you more about them in the next final part.