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.

Instead of writing an article, I decided to film the first module for everyone who works in the production team so that you can see and learn the core functions of GameRefinery, and find ways to supercharge the effectiveness of your GameRefinery platform usage saving your time. 

The functions we’ll go through in the Production module are helpful in all stages of development from concepting to liveops. During the 30 minute long video, we’ll focus on how you can use GameRefinery to:

 1. Milestone products

 2. Build a MoSCoW list for new projects – Must Have, Should have, would have features

 3. Prioritize your backlog based on data on the most impactful features and updates

 …And much more. In this post, you’ll find a breakdown of the features we go through in our Production education module.

 Prepare your popcorns & enjoy!

Market Explorer – Finding feature popularity

Market Explorer is a treasure trove of market data on specific features. Production can utilize this data to form a MoSCoW-list of an upcoming game, understand top-grossing games’ unique feature sets, and help see which features would, for example, fit into their liveops game. Market Explorers segment creation sets no boundaries on how you can drill down into feature level data.

Slicing & Dicing Top 100 Grossing Games’ Must Have Features

Compare Games – Finding key differences between games

There is always that question in everyone’s mind “What makes this top-grossing game tick?.” Using Compare games, we can not only see the feature level differences from meta, core and art style to IAP features, but we can compare up to four games and, most importantly, our own prototypes. 

Update Impacts – Analyze the update impact of a specific feature in your backlog

There is a constant thought going on in every POs mind “will implementing this feature help our KPIs?.”

Using Update Impacts, you can research what kind of results, for example, all your competitors got from implementing exactly the same feature after softlaunch. You will learn which feature goes in tandem with other features, but you’ll see at what point in their life cycle other games added the feature to the game. 

 Hit or miss – Will my new feature make the difference?

Implementation Examples – Building an archive of best implementation examples for my team

One of the most excruciating parts of any features development is the research of existing games and getting the screenshots of their version of the specific feature. Using Implementation Examples and Collections, you can quickly create a folder per feature for designers to see and most importantly UI artists. Cutting the research time from hours, even days, to mere minutes!

Sharing is caring! – How to share GameRefinery research with your team

Game Analyzer – How to create a milestone

 Now that you’ve done the research of potential features using market explorer, compare games & update impacts, it’s time to see how your game would look like if all the features in your new backlog would be added into the game. Using Game Analyzer, you can easily create a milestone for your game and add those backlog features to reflect the game’s future iteration and, most importantly, market potential! 

Tips & Tricks: Roadmap games with Game Analyzer

Last words

As you can see, there are endless data points in GameRefinery for production folks to see feature level requirements for their game to succeed and to validate the value of existing backlog!

Of course, every project is unique with its characteristics and development phases, depending on whether it is in production or liveops. That’s why you can always send us an email, or chat with us, and we can have our own tailored production module session with the team to meet your current requirements and objectives!

The post Tips & Tricks – Walking through GameRefinery’s core functions for production appeared first on GameRefinery.

Our work is finished (at least on this front – software as a service is never finished….poor product team), and we are happy to announce that all motivations & archetypes related data is now accessible in one of our most versatile tools, Market Explorer. Combined with Market Explorer’s versatility and ability to breakdown any genre, gameplay mechanic, or game criteria into the bits & bolts users need, this offers entirely new insight into the games market.

Editor’s note: This blog post is updated with the newest Motivations update introduced to the GameRefinery service in December 2020.

There are four places where you can utilize our Motivations data for:
1. Creating segments – You can, for example, emphasize only the games which are strong in “Escapism & solving.”

2. Games Data – Immediately access averages on data for motivational drivers of all the games that meet your segment criteria and start comparing them!

3. Features data – See the average motivational scores for games that have the feature implemented!

4. In December 2020 we brought a new Motivations update to the service! Since launching motivations in Q2 we have received tons of positive feedback and development suggestions! One recurring piece of feedback was the missing option of seeing the features that drive the 12 motivational drivers we track. We heard your feedback and with this update, features that appeal to each of the 12 motivational drivers are visible on the GameRefinery platform. Read more about the update here!

If you want to see whether your game has similar player archetypes to the top 200 grossing Match3 games or are curious to know which features are implemented in the best performing “excitement & thrill” games, this data addon is for you!

Motivations & Archetypes in Market Explorer offer endless possibilities for game designers, analysts, and production folks to see what/how competitors are resonating with the player base, find information about features, and take that data to the drawing board.

I made a quick video to demonstrate some things you can do, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy!

If you have any questions regarding this latest feature or want to get it into your own package, send us a message! We are happy to help.

The post July 2020 Product Update: Motivations & Archetypes 2.0 – Expanding to Market Explorer appeared first on GameRefinery.