Comments on: How hot is your game genre?

By: chanon

chanon — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:54:36 +0000

Great post!
I very much agree that genre more than polish determines how well a game can do.
I think you have to be exceptionally good to be able to develop a game in a genre that isn’t hot but becomes a hit.
It is possible, but harder.
But if you do pull it off, there is a chance that you might have not just a hit .. but a *huge* hit. (On the other hand you could have a very bad flop.)

I gave this advice before .. ‘the single most important decision you make as an indie game developer is what game to make’. In this case, the genre of game is the big decision.

By: James

James — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:48:29 +0000

When our game was released, it debuted in the top 10 and went all the way to #3. 7 weeks later it’s still in the top ten, only dropping off once.

We spent a year developing the game, and the entire time I thought the whole genre would collapse before we went gold or even worse, the crowding of the genre would relegate our game to obscurity.

BFG has speculated that the HO genre will still last for another year, and the next ‘big’ thing will be click-adventures, like Dream chronicles.

When I heard how well our game did, I signed up for the sequel. I’ve put off my original IP until it can be fully funded by my clone games.

Now, I’m ashamed of coding clone games, but the fact is that’s what the people want. Try not looking at it as if you’re in it for the money, but in it for the customer.

Also, when Bejeweled 3 comes out, it’ll revitalize the match-3 market.

By: Roman

Roman — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:35:40 +0000

I believe that the top 100 chart is not correlated with Mac sales at all.

While it’s obvious which genres are king right now, it wasn’t soo obvious that there is so huge chasm in sales potential between genres.

Amazonia is a one year old game. It was launched close to Runes of Avalon 1. I could not believe that people prefer Amazonia over Runes, but know I think I understand why (we screwed up level design and tutorials).

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:11:25 +0000

Very interesting analysis thanks. Yeah Fairway remained the #1 card/board game for a while even though it had dropped down in the top 100 to like position 20-30 or something (I didn’t note the exact data at the time). Also when it was the #1 Mac game, it didn’t go up much in the top 100, just a few places for a week or so.

Amazonia was polished enough, but it was very forgettable imho. There were some much better match-3s out in the last 6 months. A quick check of the BFG game launcher revealed I player it for 9 minutes which says it all. Some match-3s I play the whole hour…

Regarding the charts, don’t forget their is probably a time component (a “sample period”) which could be 30 days or even more. This may mess the analysis up a bit maybe. I was also told that the top 10 is based on a special formula which combines downloads, sales, conversion rate etc. I presume the sub-pages top 10s are using the same formula but there is no guarantee of course…

It’s pretty obvious which genres are king right now. You’ll probably find it interesting to see what genre my next game is, but I can’t say more now…