The hypercasual market is huge; multiple games companies have shifted focus to capitalise on the craze.
As part of Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki Digital, Crazy Labs head of publishing Moria Goldstein Toren discusses from casual to hypercasual – a practical guide on how to turn your casual production team to a hypercasual commando unit.
Hypercasual games are much quicker to produce than that of the casual variety. As such, it provides plenty of opportunity to developers and publishers, should an idea not play out in the hypercasual market, it can be scrapped early on, with only a couple of weeks lost to it. Meanwhile, a casual game is in production for a more extended period.
Moreover, hypercasual games tend to perform well in the charts given the high number of downloads they attract.
Why go hyper?
There is a massive appeal when it comes to hypercasual games. They can be played quickly, so players can pick it up wherever they are, and often hypercasual titles can be played using one hand.
When it comes to revenue, hypercasual is responsible for five per cent, but that number does jump to 12 per cent with downloads.
When you have an idea for hypercasual, be sure to ask yourself “do people want to play my game?” If the answer is yes, it is time to move into CTI and CPI testing, should those prove successful, it is time to begin development and test for retention. Again, if successful, it is time to test scaling, if that shows promising results, it is time to release your game worldwide.
Quick-release
When compared to casual, hypercasual are so much quicker to produce as casual games take around 18 months to create when hyper takes approximately two months. Moreover, hypercasual games can bring in three times more downloads and through a team of three compared to a group of 15 working on a casual game.
In the best-case scenario, a hypercasual developer creates a good game within four weeks. A worst-case scenario means the team has a failed idea but has only worked on it for two weeks.
For Crazy Labs, the $5 million revenue milestone for hypercasual games has been hit between seven and 12 weeks depending upon the title. As such, this shows that hypercasual games can bring in fast revenue and a high number of downloads.
“It takes a lot of time and tries and failure on the way. But with talented teams, you can do it very fast,” said Goldstein Toren.
Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki Digital is the best of our Pocket Gamer Connects conference in an online form, with an entire week of talks, meetings, and pitch events taking place from September 14th to the 18th. You can read up on all the tracks taking place throughout the week here.
