PreMortem.Games

APRIL 11, 2023

Thief Puzzle: to pass a level Another new hit with 27M downloads is Thief Puzzle: to pass a level. The game’s monetization strategy is focused primarily on In-app Ads: it has short levels with a big amount of post-level and try-again Interstitial ad placements that allow Thief Puzzle: to pass a level to generate high LTV.

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Tile Racing Puzzle Games 104

Deconstructor of Fun

JUNE 3, 2019

The reason for this acquisition was the success of Small Giant’s hit game, Empires & Puzzles. Since mid 2017, Empires & Puzzles has raked in $260M in net revenues with only 34M installs. Empires and Puzzles regularly takes the top spot in Puzzle RPG category in the West (when Dokkan is having a post event hangover).

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Puzzle Feature Build Balance 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JUNE 24, 2024

Genre-Specific Winners: Puzzle Games Prevailed: The genre fell by only 6% YoY in downloads and gained 10% in IAP revenue, thanks to new games like Block Blast and Royal Match, and established hits such as Candy Crush and Gardenscapes. Puzzle remained strong by focusing on retaining its current user base through events and live operations.

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Mobile Mobile Games Mobile Gaming 75

Ask a Game Dev

DECEMBER 20, 2022

When designing a puzzle, a designer must think of the process by which the player interacts with them. Place and advertise the clues to the puzzle goal within the environment. This can be subtle or it can be obvious, depending on whether the puzzle is optional or part of the critical path.

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Puzzle Playtesting Advertising Dev 52

Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 9, 2023

Dream Games has joined that list by bolstering its hold on match-3 puzzles and widening its already mass-market audience through the addition of its newest game, Royal Kingdom , which features one of the smoothest casual PvP designs in the market. This makes sense; in context, why change a formula that works if you don’t need to?

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Puzzle Mechanics Feature Build 69

Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 23, 2024

Games are diving into content platforms in the wake of YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix’s success. The two main flavors are subscription bundles (Xbox Game Pass, Apple Arcade) and user-generated content aka UGC (Roblox, Fortnite Creator). For YouTube, advertising revenue can be directly attributed to videos.

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Platformer Content Advertising Puzzle 64

Game Refinery

MAY 4, 2023

In the past, hybridization was mainly seen in 4X strategy games that merged with puzzle and idle RPG mechanics , but in recent months this phenomenon has spread to titles of all shapes and sizes across the market – not just the hybrid-casual genre. In many respects, this change isn’t particularly surprising.

Mobile Gaming 101

Mobile Gaming Mobile Mobile Mechanics 101

Deconstructor of Fun

FEBRUARY 7, 2021

But given the degree to which speculation about IDFA has dominated discussions about mobile games marketing since June, before jumping into the substantive predictions for the year, it makes sense to commence the piece with a set of machine-gun hypotheses around the direct impacts on mobile games advertisers of IDFA deprecation. Not really.

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Advertising Mobile Gaming Mobile Mobile 52

Game Refinery

JUNE 21, 2023

Companies have since been forced to seek permission from app users before tracking their activity across other apps and websites for advertising purposes, meaning they now lack much of the valuable data previously used to build highly-effective UA campaigns. The match3 puzzler Best Fiends demonstrates this well.

Mobile Gaming 17

Mobile Gaming Mobile Mobile Games 17

The Bottom Feeder

OCTOBER 9, 2024

In other words: Is your story so good that people give you free advertising? And word-of-mouth is the best advertising.) It doesn't matter how good your content is if nobody sees it. Portal was a solid 2 hour puzzle game. Meme your characters? Cosplay as your characters? Write fan-fiction about your game? Then it's good.

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Writing Games Art Advertising 80

Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 19, 2021

In “ Apple IDFA Change has Triggered 15-20% Revenue drops in iOS advertisers ”, Gamesbeat’s Dean Takahashi interviewed Brian Bowman, founder of marketing services firm Consumer Acquisition, on his heavily publicized anti-Apple stance. How in-game ATT acceptance is affected by the advertising app’s ATT acceptance rate by Business of Apps.

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Advertising Games Platformer Studios 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 17, 2023

Overall, in the key Western markets, MMORPGs, Roguelikes, Merge and Puzzle genres largely bucked the recession in terms of revenue. At the same time, cross-platform open-world RPG Genshin Impact continues to break new ground, crossing its $3 Billion in IAP Spend in Q2 2022. Until next week. ?

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Mobile Gaming Mobile Mobile Sandbox 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 26, 2021

Netflix games are part of the core subscription offering First, in the shareholder letter, Netflix makes it clear that they “view gaming as another new content category… games will be included in members’ Netflix subscription at no additional cost similar to films and series.” Netflix games will start on mobile. But as executable DLC?

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Mobile Mobile Mobile Gaming Games 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 23, 2020

Can the content or art pipeline be streamlined? Is the live ops content expensive to produce? For background on the deprecation of the IDFA and why the IDFA is so integral to the growth of most mobile games, see this post and this post. Attrition: Will key members of the acquired company’s team leave? Model 3: Early Stage Bets.

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Mobile Gaming Mobile Mobile Co-op 52

Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

You need to be able to do very targeted advertising, which is severely impacted by ATT. Re-engagement advertising has also been decimated by ATT. I’ve said this number before and people push back on it, but there is about 100 thousand social casino payers, so everybody is chasing them.” Issue #1 The audience is very small.

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Mobile Mobile Puzzle Mobile Gaming 52

Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 12, 2023

Rush Wars was the PvE version of Clash Royale in the Boom Beach setting Clash Quest was Legend of Solgard in the Clash setting Hay Day Pop was a puzzle and decorate game with Hay Day IP Everdale is a Hay Day Derby feature as a game Clash Mini is the most innovative one. It’s Team Fight Tactics for casuals. Quite the contrary.

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Mobile Mobile Engine Engineering 118

Deconstructor of Fun

JUNE 6, 2022

The fact that Battle Passes have been successful on audiences so alien to each other like MOBAs and Match-3 Puzzle fans shows how versatile its design can be. They involve player skill and time spent, so the contents are perceived as more meritocratic and effort-based than a direct purchase. In other words, Passes don’t expire.

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Content Mechanics Balance Mobile 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JUNE 3, 2020

This article is the last and, the most important piece of the “scaling” puzzle focusing on the nothing less than the game that is being promoted and the teams that are promoting it. They were also one of the first companies to run puzzle ads at scale, that are now used by pretty much every larger advertiser in the space.

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Games Mobile Mobile Art 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 31, 2021

Hub worlds are coming In addition to trying to acquire properties in other genres, apps will likely try to appeal to players from other genres, particularly puzzle and casual , with popular features like explorable hub worlds, homes, and other custom design areas. Event- and content-specific currencies is a trend we’re across all the genres.

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Mobile Mobile Games Feature 52

Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 25, 2024

And meta-game systems such as leader-boards, events, and battle passes need to be interesting enough to scale for months and months — ideally with very little new content needed to be developed by the publisher. Experience with idle games — making a repetitive action seem fun and not taxing — is key.

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Games Platformer Balance Mobile 52

Deconstructor of Fun

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

This is showcased in the downward trending right-side graph, where we use the “average number of games Playtika’s key slots titles are being advertised in” as a proxy for UA spend. This can be seen in the image below, where Simulation, Merge Puzzle and MOBA titles from Big Fish and Plarium are currently in soft-launch. Euro Bites.

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Mobile Mobile Feature UX 52

CG Spectrum

JUNE 10, 2024

Previs animator - Previs artists create and block out 3D digital content that helps visualize what a scene, set, or certain actions will look like before it’s filmed, created, or finalized. Their work can include artwork for film, elements for video games, advertisements, graphic design, book cover art, and more.

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Film Animation Animation Concepts 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 17, 2020

On looking deeper, it was found that this was driven by two things - 30-35% of the growth was driven by increased IAP integration in various hypercasual mini-genres, most notably Puzzle. And given how important content is to the players of these games, this subscription offering naturally became a key revenue driver for CGs.

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Mechanics Platformer Studios Data 52

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 10, 2021

Laura Taranto has 12 years experience in casual games and is a product advisor and puzzle game aficionado. Thankfully, your faithful crew at DoF are here to try and help you make sense of it, well, at least the very specific part of it related to puzzle games. Mat Baker has been making mobile games for 15 years. It made $5.1

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Puzzle Mobile Mobile Games 52

Deconstructor of Fun

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

Clash Quest is Supercell’s most recent attempt at disrupting the puzzle category through titles like Smash Land , Spooky Pop, and Hay Day Pop , each of them trying to achieve success from different angles. Clash Quest 101 In terms of gameplay, Clash Quest can be categorized as a blast-based midcore Puzzle game with some RPG components.

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Puzzle Mechanics Content Dev 52

Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 25, 2022

Developing a detailed, polished universe like this presumably took a lot of time and effort from the team, but it pays off in the end as they continuously push out more content over time for player engagement. In terms of content, the plot of Cookie Run: Kingdom advances very quickly while maintaining a grip on the details of the characters.

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Baking Simulation Build Animation 52

Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 3, 2023

With Blizzard's expertise in creating compelling end-game content, Warcraft Rumble has the potential to become a major success and influence future game design trends. ? Plus given the size of Blizzard I’m sure they won’t go lightly when it comes to advertising and getting as many users as possible for launch day.

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Mobile Mobile Mobile Gaming Games 113

Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 24, 2022

Casual Games in 2022 In our taxonomy, built together with Sensor Tower, the casual games category is divided into seven genres: Puzzle, Hypercasual, Arcade, Tabletop, Simulation, Lifestyle, and Geolocation. Puzzle Games The King is Back. Outside of Merge, 2021 felt a bit empty with respect to new puzzle games.

Puzzle 52

Puzzle Mobile Gaming Mobile Mobile 52

Deconstructor of Fun

AUGUST 27, 2019

Part of Fibonad Group (the largest Spanish digital advertising group offering Branding, Performance and Publishing services), Lab Cave has achieved more than 200 million organic downloads without running any paid acquisitions campaign. the second piece of the puzzle. To make sure you don’t miss on all of the ?content

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Balance Content Mechanics Mobile 52

Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 2, 2022

Understanding players and marketability have also become more important, leading to larger companies increasingly building content fortresses – in which they acquire a user and move them between games in their portfolio. This has led to a resurgence in the value of IP in the market, as it is now harder to get new users.

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Mobile Mobile Balance Mobile Gaming 52

Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

With Blizzard's expertise in creating compelling end-game content, Warcraft Rumble has the potential to become a major success and influence future game design trends. Plus given the size of Blizzard I’m sure they won’t go lightly when it comes to advertising and getting as many users as possible for launch day.

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Mobile Mobile Mobile Gaming Games 52

Radiator Blog

JUNE 30, 2022

CONTENT WARNING 1: I mention a suicide from a century ago. CONTENT WARNING 2: the game is rather explicit, but I've kept the imagery in this post relatively tame, at a semi-NSFW / soft-R rating. A dense randomized mini-chess puzzle where everything matters. SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils what happens in the game.

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Code Educational Education Prototyping 40