We continue to summarize the results of 2020 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Leonid Yeletskikh, Sales Director at Adjust.
Leonid Yeletsky
How was 2020 for the company?
For Adjust, 2020 turned out to be an important year from a product point of view. We have launched about 100 new features in the product, including becoming the first on the market to track subscriptions. They were also the first to bring an SDK compatible with iOS 14 to the market. We have also released solutions for automation, bot detection and fraud prevention in applications.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
First, I will tell you a little about how the pandemic has affected the market in general. According to our data, there was a huge spike in activity and installations during the lockdown. The games saw an accelerated increase in downloads throughout the first half of the period. In general, the number of game application installations has more than doubled (132%) over the year compared to 2019.
If he talks about trends, then the main one, of course, is a change in data security. The entire second half of the year was spent for Adjust and our partners under the sign of IDFA and iOS 14.
What new market trends would you note in general?
I will focus on hyper-casual games. They ceased to be considered the simplest applications, gained meta and a lot of mechanics borrowed from casual projects. Today, hyper—casual games are no longer just a fashionable genre, but an important market segment with its own leaders and rules of the game.
And, of course, the pandemic has affected their performance. The number of installations of hyper-casual games in the world increased by 103% from December 2019 to March 2020, and in China by 3.5 times in 4 months.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
We have big plans for 2021: we continue to expand our presence and strive to become a universal platform that meets all the needs of mobile marketers.
Right now, all our attention is focused on Apple's proposed privacy changes for iOS 14 (they will take effect in early 2021). Securing user consent should now be a top priority for marketers, because applications that solve this task will have a strong competitive advantage. If you manage to convince your users to consent to data collection, not much will change in your marketing.
But for this, it is critically important that developers build a clear messaging and intuitive UX. The mobile industry should see changes in data regulation as an opportunity to create a sustainable shared future for advertisers, app developers and end users.
Which third-party game releases are you interested in?
I was very interested in Ghost of Tsushima — it turned out to be a swan song for PS4. I liked Hades as a completely new look at the history of Ancient Greece. As a representative of the mobile industry, I was really looking forward to mobile LoL, and as a user, I'm waiting for the opportunity to get behind Cyberpunk 2077 without all the bugs and problems.