Mobile gaming is emerging as the prime pastime for a record number of consumers. With the onset of social distancing rules, more people than ever are using their downtime to discover new games, or binge on favorites. In a single week in March 2020, users globally downloaded a whopping 1.2 billion mobile games — amounting to the biggest week ever for app installs.
Leading this surge is gaming’s fastest growing category: hyper casual. These bitesize pieces of content have taken the industry by storm, allowing players who might not even identify as gamers to idle away a few minutes here and there. With simplistic yet satisfying mechanics, their accessibility and ease of understanding not only gives them broad appeal but allows developers to make them quickly, see what sticks and then scale the marketing once they’ve found a hit.
But a spike in the market in 1Q 2020 may not be indicative of an industry trend. Hyper casuals had dominated download charts long before COVID-19 (representing 78% of the most downloaded new games of 2019), and the category is poised to grow and evolve, with more titles adopting a ‘hybrid casual’ model.
The rise of hyper casual gaming is broken down in Adjust’s latest report, created in partnership with Unity. The report benchmarks hyper casual performance both pre- and post-install, while also giving marketers new to the genre a primer on what these apps are all about.
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How COVID-19 affected hyper casual gaming apps
The global pandemic has upended societies and economies everywhere, but what has been the impact on hyper casual gaming? Our first look suggests that the COVID-19 has significantly contributed to driving more users to the genre. Cumulative install and session data for six countries from Adjust reveals how stay-at-home orders have increased interest in hyper casuals throughout the pandemic.
For the period December 2019 to March 2020, installs more than doubled (103%) globally and as installs rose, sessions ballooned to match. Compared to December 2019, which had already exceeded one billion sessions, hyper casual sessions increased a further 72% in March. An examination of the ratio of paid vs. organic installs show the opposite dynamic as the number of apps installed from paid advertising declined 26% from 80% in October 2019 to 59% in March 2020. Ironically, organics come out the winner, showing that people stuck at home are more willing to browse and experiment.
The challenge going forward will be sustainability and growth prospects for the hyper casual genre after social distancing eases. Will new users continue to flock toward the genre? And will the broader trend of growing ad inventory be reversed as the overall economy picks up, allowing key metrics and methods to revert back to their pre-crisis mean? Will margins suffer from this drop? Nothing is for certain, but it does appear as though the business model of hyper casuals is here to stay. This will no doubt have implications for mobile marketers from other verticals, as the overall trend toward optimization and automation takes hold.
For more insights into the rise of hyper casual gaming and the effects of COVID-19 on the industry, download Adjust’s hyper casual gaming report 2020 here.
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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by Adjust.
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