This article is part of an ongoing series of data-driven articles from PocketGamer.biz and App Annie highlighting trends in the global mobile games sector using App Annie’s Game IQ analytics.
Game IQ enables mobile game developers to dig into the data and discover not only which games are performing best but what characteristics they have.
In this week’s column, we’re considering the top 10 grossing Bingo games, which fall under the Game IQ classification of Casino/Traditional/Bingo.
It’s a subgenre that’s experienced strong growth.
“Bingo is among the fastest-growing Traditional Casino subgenres – jumping 55 per cent from Q4 2019 to Q4 2020.” comments App Annie’s Director of Market Insights, Amir Ghodrati.
All the right numbers
The first thing to notice is that you can’t have a bingo game without mentioning bingo in the title, at least once.
It’s also interesting to see the 10 titles in this chart are published by 10 different companies, which demonstrates something of the competition and lack of defensible features in such a well-understood and generic gameplay experience.
Of course, the surprising variation is in terms of how basic bingo gameplay is matched with other distinguishing features ranging from IP such as Monopoly in Sony’s Bingo Bash to a heavy focus on core retention mechanics such as daily rewards, special events, and multiplayer.
Most of the top Bingo games feature online multiplayer, leaderboards, and robust item collection and customization systems.
The latter is a feature of most of these bingo games but particularly highlighted in games such as Bingo Party.
“Most of the top Bingo games feature online multiplayer, leaderboards, and robust item collection and customisation systems that further deepen player engagement and monetization,” says Ghodrati.
“Such social features have proven to be effective for monetisation, and we’ve seen a general emphasis in social gaming features from users as people sought various forms of connection with friends during the past year.
“Games across genres will need to prioritize this type of functionality if they want to keep up with top performers in the industry.
Game IQ is a vertically tailored analytics product, developed by App Annie, that provides insight into dimensions such as class, genre, subgenre and tags. Games can now be analyzed by broad category class (tuning), genre, subgenre, and tags (modifiers) such as IP, art style, settings, monetization mechanic, and more.
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