Hypercasual is dead? No! It never lived!

Hypercasual is dead? No! It never lived! How can something die that never lived? I believe that every living thing has a soul but there is no soul in hypercasual games - It is gamification of advertisements! I don’t know anyone proudly telling a story, bribing with a hilarious win or just remembering the fun after a couple of months. The Hypercasual we see in the current market was never meant to have a soul. Damn, I know publishers that don’t care about game design unless the game contains a visually satisfying mechanic for ads. It is a marketing tool to generate traffic via ads, keep the user for an hour to monetize them with ads and repeat. These are no games for me, this has no soul and for sure no future. But it is a great business model and I respect everyone making a living or more with this.

So why do people say it’s dead, like Alexander Shea from Voodoo? Well it is relatively cheap to produce a hypercasual game compared to others and it was relatively cheap and easy to promote - thanks to google and facebook's ad solutions. Yeah it was. But now the market is flooded with bad bad baaaad quality games and visibility requires a lot of innovative ideas and way way waaay more budget. So hyper casual studios with a growth strategy are re-calculating and casual to hardcore games are more promising when we talk about production and marketing costs vs. long term profitability. And did you know that - ''Only one country, Turkey, saw a larger rise in hypercasual installs, rising 35% year-on-year." - poketgamer.biz?

Shall I shut down my hyper casual studio, now? Nooo! Just make sure to have a proper growth strategy. Continue whatever is still profitable but prepare yourself for making games with (more) depth. Use the learnings from your massive prototyping experience, build an art asset library from the hundreds of models your team made and get someone in your team with high game design, economy and monetization skills - work modular to reuse the best. You will continue to do market analysis, promotions via ads and test prototypes but it needs to have soul. Check back with your team what game they can and want to do, think about early, mid and late game goals for the player and build and keep your vision. You and your team must understand what you are building, so be patient.

I see big changes coming to our industry. Let’s help each other. Hit us up if you need support with this

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