This industry needs a shakeup. It needs a change. From our experience, you usually need to smash through around a hundred prototypes before you even find a marketable idea. That’s one hundred fresh ideas. One hundred mechanics to develop. One hundred tests to run. All for one hyper-casual game.
Let’s put that in perspective. It takes – on average – two weeks to create a prototype. So if you need a hundred prototypes, it’s going to take almost four years to find that one idea. And that’s before you even start marketing it.
While that might sound daunting at first, it’s clearly possible. Sensor Tower found that the hyper-casual genre had 31% of the downloads among the top 1,000 games. And newzoo reports that the mobile gaming market will hit $90 billion in 2021.
So there’s value – and cash to be made – in hyper-casual games and they’re rapidly becoming more and more popular. But how are studios going to get all the ideas they need?
Studios need to become more independent
If studios are going to grow, hire more developers and keep pace with the market, they’re going to need more of a share and have more options for them. At the moment, publishers dictate the process and take a huge share.
This approach won’t keep pace with the sheer number of prototypes that studios need to create. Publishers are looking for ideas, when this could easily be done by the studios themselves. By shifting the responsibility over to studios, and allowing them more independence, it’ll actually help both sides of the equation.
This is why we’ve released new models for working, like our Golden Cohort, to allow developers to take back control, take a bigger share and come up with ideas themselves.
Studios need to be able to research
It’s no good just blindly running a brainstorm. You need the facts and data to serve as inspiration. What’s popular? Which sub-genres are doing well? What kinds of mechanics are the top-charting games using? These questions can only be answered using market intelligence tools that analyse the market and update regularly.
Not only that, studios need to be able to research the current trends in advertising. What’s getting players to click through and download your game? A good idea only works if the advert is catchy enough.
This is why we’ve created tools like Market Intelligence and Creative Insights, so that developers can do their own research and make their own decisions.
Studios need tools that focus on hyper-casual
Sure, there are tools out there that help studios research and test game concepts. But they’re all too broad, covering too many genres. They don’t tend to look deep into the hyper-casual industry specifically, which means the data can be misleading. It could easily set developers down a path that would only really work for a different genre.
So we’re creating tools that focus on the hyper-casual industry and provide the data that studios need, completely transparently.
Studios need tools that are free
Even if studios can find a tool that helps them come up with ideas, the solutions out there are expensive. And most developers don’t have a huge amount of capital behind them to fund their independence. They can’t afford these vast tools.
So when a studio partners with us, we give them access to tools for free. They give them the ability to research and test, without them needing to invest in expensive tools.
At Coda, we’re focusing on solving these problems
We’re going to change how hyper-casual games are made. And help studios make a killing, making games. It should be practical and easy to make a livelihood and even thrive. It just needs the right tools and systems in place to give studios the freedom they need. So we’ll create them.
And studios need the data – so we’ll provide it. Clearly and transparently. We’ll make sure studios can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t. Whether that’s for a prototype or for their advertising.
That’s why we’ve developed our suite of products, all tied together through our Interactive Game Brief, so that you can organise, collaborate and store those ideas. We’re creating market intelligence tools to find the ideas. Building ways to get creative insights into how to make your adverts. Filling a concept store to save you time, so you can work on ideas that have already been tested. And testing tools to make sure your idea is viable.
All for free. All focused on the hyper-casual industry. And all to help you on the journey to independence. We’ll be there along the way, guiding you towards success. But we want to level the playing field.
Are you ready? Become a partner and start today.
