Alexander Bezobrazov, Marketing Director of Social Quantum, reveals how to understand how promising a particular genre is, using the example of culinary time managers.
Alexander BezobrazovMarket and niches
The other day, Alexander published the material “Research market saturation for mobile F2P games” on the Medium platform. One of the central theses of the article is that the dynamics of the gaming market varies greatly from niche to niche.
Each market segment may feel differently at one time or another. Depending on its state, it is either of interest to the developer, or not. To understand the prospects of a niche, you can use its analysis.
The article is devoted to how exactly the analysis should be carried out. Alexander shares his own approach to analysis using the example of analyzing culinary time managers. Or, more precisely, the market of fritupley simulators of restaurants on the Google Play site in the USA.
Genre
Culinary time managers are games for a casual audience, whose monetization is usually based on IAP. Advertising is also found in some projects as an additional monetization channel.
In games of this genre, the user plays the role of a waiter / cook who serves a large flow of customers. The gameplay boils down to following production chains.
For example, in Cooking Fever from Nordcurrent, a player receiving an order must choose the right buns for a hamburger, put the right salad, vegetables, meat, sauce, and then hand the finished dish to the client.
Cooking FeverThe box office of the genre
Such a game direction can not be called very cash. In June 2019, there was not a single culinary time manager in the box office top 100 on Google Play in the USA.
But they were found in a wider sample. There were 7 such games in the box office top 500 of Google Play. Together, they earned $1.8 million in a month.
Estimated revenue of culinary Time Managers (Google Play, USA, June 2019)
In general, since January 2016, only 23 games of this genre have ever been in the top 500 of the highest-grossing US games on Android (an analysis will be conducted on their basis).
Throughout this time, the leaders were about the same 3-5 applications.
Top culinary time managers by the number of months spent in the top 500 (Google Play, USA) since January 2016Niche Analysis
The first thing to do for niche analysis is to understand the dynamics of revenue and downloads,” writes Alexander
With the help of App Annie, it turned out that the total audience of the genre (more precisely, its 23 leading representatives) in the United States reached a plateau of 1.1 million monthly users.
Dynamics of the cumulative MAU of culinary time managers from the top 500 (Google Play, USA, January 2016 – June 2019)
The cumulative downloads of the genre have not been growing for the last two years.
Now they amount to 0.8-1 million installations per month. At the same time, the segment’s revenue is steadily growing. The top twenty projects at the end of June 2019 earned more than in the same period two years earlier.
Dynamics of total revenue with IAP in culinary time managers from the top 500 (Google Play, USA, January 2016 – June 2019)
Alexander makes the assumption that the latter is due to the improvement of monetization in culinary time managers.
This is confirmed by the ARPMAU rating of the chart: the average income per monthly active user has grown in recent years.
ARPMAU dynamics in culinary time managers from the top 500 (Google Play, USA, January 2016 – June 2019)
At the same time, the number of minutes that users spend in total in games of this genre, as a whole, remained at the same level (282 million minutes per month) as two years ago.
Players are not ready to spend more time on projects of this genre.
Conclusions
Alexander reduces the obtained data to the following conclusions:
- the niche is not growing either in the number of active users or in the rate of downloads;
- the niche is gradually growing revenue from a stable loyal base of players;
- the niche may have reached its limit in terms of the time players spend on it.
It is the lack of an active base and the lack of growth in the time spent on the genre that indicates strong competition in the market, which will certainly affect the CPI and ROI when launching a new project.
However, this does not mean that the novelty will not be able to succeed within the niche. The stories of the relatively recently released Dinner DASH Adventures and Cooking Diary suggest the opposite.