Is hyper-casual hyper-crowded?

And what’s needed to survive in the competitive market…

Just a couple of years ago, few knew what the term hyper-casual meant and even fewer cared. And yet now, already, some are suggesting that hyper-casual has become hyper-crowded; a genre that’s reached its natural peak.

Can it really be true that the dominant publishers, in conjunction with the sheer number of competing studios and solo developers, have the market all sewn up? Is hyper-casual no longer a welcoming or viable space for developers looking to find their audience? Our answer to those questions would be a resounding ‘no’, but it is easy to understand where they come from. In the past year or so, at least 20 new companies have entered the hyper-casual market in a significant way. It’s gone from a blue ocean with only a few front-runners achieving demonstrable success, to an area that has very quickly begun to appear saturated.

It’s all about strong ideas and marketing

We see that the demand for hyper-casual games remains extremely high, but this doesn’t guarantee anyone success. Our lesson from this is that the companies generating significant revenues will be those with strong enough ideas — and a sufficiently strong marketing strategy to support them.

Appearing innovative

Now more than ever, new hyper-casual games need innovative gameplay — or at least gameplay that appears to be innovative thanks to a meaningful spin applied to familiar mechanics. This, at the end of the day, is crucial: how will your game look when advertised? Can you imagine players watching mere seconds of your video ad and being intrigued enough to hit download?

This mindset will be invaluable, but it needs to be backed up by a solid team with marketing smarts working on the game from the outset, applying robust marketing strategies and tools.

Pushing the boundaries

For instance, we are never afraid to do something a bit different. When it comes to creatives, we are always playing with fresh approaches that might go against conventional wisdom; why not have fun with elements of live action video, for instance? So long as it ultimately helps to showcase the game and you have the skills to produce something unique and fun, as we do, then this can certainly be another string to your bow.

Filming our Lead Marketing Artist getting hit in the face with a water balloon outside our office, or even producing more elaborate skits under lockdown by patching together multiple short clips filmed by our team members at their homes, might not seem like an obvious way to market hyper-casual mobile games. But these are things we have done, because we believe that players want to see something new. The key is to balance this desire to be creative with a respect for the game itself and to be led above all else by the player response to the resulting ads — a line we are always careful to tread.

Because at the end of the day, any major hyper-casual game success today requires either great marketing strategy or great luck — and with the influx of new hyper-casual developers, the latter is not a realistic aim to stake your business on.

In short, creative is king! It’s crucial to be continually conceptualising, testing and iterating upon new ad creatives. There are many guidelines for making hyper-casual games, but even the most perfect hyper-casual gameplay experiences will lose you money if not backed by good creatives.

Size matters…or does it?

Of course, it would be foolish to deny that there is a massive advantage for established teams with all this in place already. With processes honed over years and the resources to bring games to the market quickly and loudly, these companies are not loosening their grip on the market anytime soon.

But it’s not just a numbers game. We created some of our biggest hits as a far smaller team than we are now, so we firmly believe that it is our fundamental approach to marketing that has been the key factor in our many hyper-casual success stories. And that’s something that teams of all sizes can work to improve.

But at the same time, provided they continue to develop great titles with a defined marketing strategy at their very core, smaller studios will also continue to find breakout success by themselves — in turn applying pressure on the larger players, like us, to keep innovating.

Is hyper-casual really hyper-crowded, then? We don’t think so, and the continued demand validates this. What is certain, however, is that you now have to be hyper-creative with your output — which includes marketing strategy — in order to succeed!

This article was written by Anthony G. Pascale, Lead UA & Monetisation Executive at Kwalee. If you are a developer with a game prototype you feel could top the global charts, visit https://kwalee.com/publish-with-us/ to find out more, and submit your game!