Last week’s PGC London 2023 event boasted many talks and panels offering tremendous insights from a variety of perspectives on where the mobile market is and where it’s heading.
One of these talks was from hypercasual publisher Voodoo, entitled “Multiplying your game’s margins with Voodoo’s casual publishing team”. In this talk Voodoo’s Head of Publishing Alex Shea discussed the key advantages that Voodoo is uniquely positioned to leverage in their business model and other aspects of their business, including their forays into Web3 technology.
However, one key takeaway from speaker Alex Shea was his statement that “Hypercasual is dead,” which for a publisher that made its name in hypercasual is a pretty bold thing to say. The evidence for such a statement?Shea observed that all the hypercasual games which Voodoo published and which proved successful in 2022 were existing titles rather than newly developed ones.
Hypercasualty
Based on the facts, Shea certainly isn’t making a controversial statement simply for the sake of it. Late last year Voodoo launched a new casual and midcore publishing division, an indication that they are already trying to diversify their publishing lineup in anticipation of a hypercasual ‘bust’.
Although Shea didn’t elaborate on the reasons for such a thing we can take an educated guess that oversaturation of the hypercasual market could prove a major factor. Given how successful the hypercasual genre has been, and the short, disposable nature of the games, it’s becoming harder and harder for novel concepts to stand out of the crowd.
Similarly, Voodoo’s decision to step into Web3 with their cryptocurrency ventures may be an attempt to capitalise on the ongoing ‘crypto winter’, with the expectation of a boom to come after the bust. Overall it’s an interesting series of moves that sees Voodoo stepping away from what has fuelled their initial success into what they predict will be the more stable world of midcore publishing.
