As a mature mobile game, Hero Wars achieved its success through a dynamic and expanding live event strategy, continuous iteration on core features, and the introduction of diverse monetization events and strategic collaborations to keep players engaged and spending.

Although Hero Wars is technically a mature game, the developers have found a way to increase revenue and DAU over successive periods. For example, we can see a spike in DAU from August 2024 to June 2025, making it a game we can learn from.

“GameRefinery’s Live Event Tracker has become a cornerstone of how we approach LiveOps and event design. Beyond just monitoring competitor activity, it’s enabled our teams to identify and implement event and competition formats that are highly relevant to our product—with a measurable positive impact on key product metrics. Thanks to this level of actionable insight, we’ve been able to align with emerging trends early, making sure we don’t miss out on critical market shifts. More importantly, the tool has been instrumental in helping us shape a long-term LiveOps strategy grounded in competitive data rather than assumptions.”

Aleksandr Sveikovskii
LiveOps Product Owner, Nexters

Hacking the Live Event Calendar for Growth

A key strategic initiative behind the success of Hero Wars is the expansion of its live event calendar.

Looking closely, we see that the overall event calendar expanded across various categories, but the key driver of growth is a significant increase in monetization-focused events.

The Monetization category in the Live Events Calendar also lists many more different IAP bundles and offers for players to purchase.

Battle Pass Feature Is a Top Revenue Driver

In particular, the Battle Pass feature has been crucial for Hero Wars. Battle Pass is a season-based monetization mechanic in which players can obtain rewards by progressing through different thresholds in the plan. They proved particularly effective during the event’s concluding days, driving revenue spikes as players strived to reap final rewards.

The game’s Battle Pass feature has also evolved through three iterations (Hero’s Way, Hero’s Way 2.0 & Hero’s Way 3.0), underscoring the critical role of continuous improvement.

Finally, Hero Wars expanded its Battle Pass offerings in September 2024 by introducing the ‘Season Pass’ alongside Hero’s Way 3.0. This ‘Season Pass’ repurposes the Hero’s Way 2.0 framework, doubling the active Battle Pass opportunities.

From Lara Croft to Titan Power: Hero Wars’s Expanding Event Horizon

The collaboration with Lara Croft in May 2024

IP collaborations are increasingly popular within the gaming industry, making thematic cohesion even more crucial. Strategic partnerships with recognizable IPs can help build structured events and streamline content delivery. This, in turn, can lead to significant reductions in player acquisition costs.

In May 2024, Hero Wars brought its first-ever collaboration event featuring the famous adventurer Lara Croft. This unique crossover created an adventure-themed ”Tomb Raider” atmosphere.

The Lara Croft-led event, The Mystery of Dominion,  featured different events and offers that made varied use of the theme:

• The Mystery of Dominion (adventure)
• Solo Missions
• Doppelganger Skin Offer
• Lara Croft in Dominion Bundles
• Lara Croft’s Artifact Bundle
• Unique offer

In the event, the player must progress in the adventure to gain access to different items. Some levels require the player to play a minigame to defeat their enemies, find the exit, and collect rewards from that level. This minigame “style” is also used in user acquisition videos and payables.

Players who participate in the Solo Mission event can also acquire event currency to buy items in the shop. An interesting observation from GameRefinery’s Live Events calendar was Hero Wars’ introduction of a pre-order bundle for Lara Croft that allowed for early acquisition. This strategic offer culminated caused revenue to surge on its closing day.

Racking up wins with Legends Draft

Legends Draft was introduced in August 2024 as an overarching event that boosts the number of events in the game. Played in permanent PVP mode, the event lets the players build teams with a draft mechanic to battle against other players’ teams. Winners rise in the ranking and receive rewards.

In the event, each player chooses a team of five heroes to combat against other players’ teams in fully automated mode. Players need Draft Coins to compete, and these restore up to five coins automatically. You can also use Emeralds (Premium currency) to buy more.

You choose two teams: one for defense and one for offense. The teams will be made with a draft mechanic, where you have three choices of Heroes, and you need to pick one of the three. This will be done five times for each team until both teams have five. You and your opponent choose at the same time a defense team, then an attacking team. Your attacking team will battle against the opponent’s defense team, and vice versa.

Winning your battle will add to your win streak, and you will be rewarded once per day. Each players gets one Win Streak Shield to save their win streak from resetting in the case of a loss—but you can also acquire up to three daily with Emeralds (premium currency). Naturally, the more points from each victory, the higher the streak.

The Tournament of Titan Power!

Hero Wars has long featured a Tournament of Power, which focuses on leveling up your Heroes. But for the first time in October 2024, players could compete by leveling up their Titans in The Tournament of Titan Power. The first solo tournament focused on Titans, it also contributes to the increase in the number of events on the Hero Wars calendar.

For newcomers to the game, Titans are another form of characters, such as Heroes, generally obtained through PVE mode by getting shards or from Gachas. Titans differ from the Heroes as they are locked behind Guild mechanics, meaning they are only available if you’re in a guild, and if you happen to transfer or leave a guild, the Titans remain locked until you join a new guild. Players attempting to access this feature prior to joining a guild are directed to the guild application portal.

Getting points in the tournament is simple: you have to upgrade the power levels of your titan characters, and your tournament score equals the power increase of all your titans. There are four different stages with different rewards that unlock when you get enough tournament points. These refresh daily. Rewards include Titian Skin Stones, Titan Potions, and Elemental or Summoning Spheres.

The main rewards for the winner include Fairy Dust, Titan Potions, and an Avatar. The event lasts 3 to 5 days and recurs at intervals ranging from 19 days to 1.5 months.

New Event Type: Seer’s Game

One example of a monetization-related event we discussed is Seer’s Game, a Russian roulette-style event introduced in March 2025 as a new event type. In the event, players test their luck to win resources and prizes. They participate by drawing cards, each round offering a chance to win rewards or encounter a cursed card that ends the round.

To win prizes and advance to the next round, the player must choose a card from two to four options. There are 30 rounds in the game, and each attempt costs 25 Seer’s Orbs. The orbs can be obtained from tasks or bundles. In each round, one card is cursed and will end the round if chosen. Players can continue by using more orbs, and the cost increases with each purchase. Some rounds have no cursed cards, indicated by a special mark. Rewards accumulate as players progress through rounds.

Tower 2.0: revamping a popular event

Tower 2.0, which is a Permanent PVE Mode, was revamped in January 2025. It’s a daily event where the player aims to get to the top of the tower by defeating enemy teams, collecting buffs, and opening chests.

Let’s talk about the changes to the previous version of Tower:

• Before, there were three level types: one with chests, one with buff altars, and one where the player fights. Now, there are just three types of floors: Relic Floors, Treasure Floors, and a final, Boss Floor. This simplifies the floor types and streamlines the experience.
• Before, by winning battles, the player earned Skulls, which can be used to get different buffs at the altar levels. Now, winning battles allows you to choose one out of three Relics. This is a clearer buff and relic system. Relics are chosen after winning battles, making them more immediate.
• The energy and health levels of the heroes used to not reset between battles. Now, the energy and health levels of the heroes reset between each Relic Floor. This is a major gameplay change, making each Relic Floor a fresh start for heroes.
• In the previous version, chests gained from levels contain gold, Tower coins, or random item fragments. Tower 2.0 has “Treasure Floors” with three chests. The first is free, and the next two cost “Emeralds” (premium currency). One of the chests contains gold, another Tower coins, and the third one contains fragments. This offers a more strategic, potentially more rewarding experience while providing a clear monetization avenue for the game.
• In Tower, points reward the player with Tower coins and gold at the end of the day. In Tower 2.0, gold is directly earned by winning Battles or Chests. 
• In the previous version, gold from chests increases by 10% after three chests and 40% after 15 chests and with VIP level. Now, you get 25% more gold if your VIP Level is 6. The tiered increase based on the number of chests is removed.

Summary

Hero Wars has consistently ranked among the top 100 grossing games on US iOS since 2019, demonstrating remarkable long-term success. A key factor in its sustained success is the increased number of live events, especially monetization-focused events and staying on top of the latest trends.

The highlights we covered here were:

• Lara Croft Collaboration (May 2024): This was the game’s first collaboration event, featuring a “Tomb Raider” themed adventure, solo missions, and various IAP bundles. A pre-order bundle for Lara Croft significantly boosted revenue on its last day.
• Legends Draft (August 2024): A permanent PvP mode where players draft teams of heroes to battle others for rankings and rewards, while introducing options to use premium currency.
• The Tournament of Titan Power (October 2024): A new solo tournament focusing on leveling up Titans, a separate character type “linked” to guild mechanics.
• Seer’s Game (March 2025): A new monetization event based on a Russian roulette-style card drawing game, offering rewards and requiring “Seer’s Orbs” to participate.
• Tower 2.0 Revamp (January 2025): A permanent PvE mode that was significantly revamped, streamlining floor types, altering the relic/buff system, resetting hero health and energy between certain floors, and a direct gold reward from battles.

These highlights are just a small fraction of the game’s large live event calendar. We highly recommend taking a look at it, especially the overarching themes!

The post How Nexters’ Hero Wars Stayed on Top with a Winning Events Strategy appeared first on GameRefinery.

Merge Mansion is an incredibly popular merge-2 game where players combine items on a merge grid to complete tasks and restore an old family mansion. Since July 2024, Metacore has steadily increased Merge Mansion‘s ROI. Looking at the data on iOS for the US market, it’s clear that Metacore is doing something right. The game saw consistent growth in 2024.

So, how did Metacore do it? The short answer is that they experimented with more events and innovative event types. They also took advantage of spikes in engagement with smart monetization strategies.

“GameRefinery’s Live Events Tracker has been an indispensable tool for us. We use the Live Events Tracker to identify the trends making a difference for casual games—for example, we explore event design, the ins and outs of user flow, and reward progressions to assess their impact. Access to these insights has helped inform our product strategy. We can isolate must-have elements that our game may be missing, contextualize our events design, and reduce overall R&D costs.

We really appreciate GameRefinery data and the support provided by their team.  We would recommend the tool to any mobile game company working in the casual space.”

Tapio Tuomola, Chief Business Officer, Metacore

Spiking Engagement With More Events and New Event Types

One of the biggest factors underpinning Merge Mansion’s success has been the increase in the average number of Live Events for the game. Comparing the number of live events, you can see that on their calendar between March 2025 and April 2024, the number has nearly doubled. 

Not only has the number of events increased, but the number of new events has also increased, according to GameRefinery’s Live Events Tracker. Looking at new event types in the six months before and after the end of July 2024, we see an obvious increase in the number of new live event types introduced.

Taking a granular look at the new events introduced, we also see a variety of event types.

To offer a clearer picture of their event strategy, we’ll break down some of the striking additions and what makes them successful.

Evolving the Battle Pass Plan With New Additions

Let’s begin by looking at Merge Mansion’s battle pass plan and one of the new additions to its event strategy.

In February, Merge Mansion introduced Merge It Up!, a new mini battle pass added to the game’s main Battle Pass. It comprises a simplified version of a battle pass of shorter duration that still includes both Free and Paid lanes.

The gist of the event is that players can accumulate additional rewards through their gameplay by simply merging items. As an added attraction, merging items in separate event boards counts toward the progression of this Battle Pass.

Merge Mansion saw a revenue spike (of +138% their typical daily revenue) on the last active day of the first instance of the brand-new “Merge it Up!” Mini Battle Pass. The temporary increase is likely attributable to the model for the event. Players can progress to the pass by merging throughout the event. They can also purchase the premium track to collect all the rewards they have accumulated thus far, even on the last day. 

“Merge It Up!” is not the only battle pass event to impact returns. In fact, battle pass is one of the most important drivers behind Merge Mansion’s revenue increases.

Looking at revenue growth from November 2024 to March 2025, the impact of battle pass events is easy to see. These crests occur either at the end of the Battle Pass run or at the beginning of the next Battle Pass. It’s also worth noting that during these spikes, there are usually a few different IAPs available to purchase.

Successful New Event Types in Merge Mansion: A Deep Dive

Secret Supply

Minigames are a staple for casual games, but it’s worth looking at one in particular, Secret Supply. It was introduced to the game in May 2024. Metacore also reworked the event in November by adding various cosmetic changes to the UI and more substantive changes to the event tasks.

Secret Supply is Merge Mansion‘s first-ever minigame event instance that combines casino and merge elements. In the minigame, players use an old arcade machine to play and collect as many event points as possible to earn rewards.

When players press the arcade machine button, several items drop. When two or more matching items align, they merge and reward the player with points. Some items are worth more than others, and players hope for valuable matches.

Everyone is limited as to how much they can use the arcade machine. After so much use, the machine “overheats” and requires a Mystery Token to be reactivated. These tokens regenerate automatically after a certain period, although players can speed up the process through in-app purchases (IAP). This event was the first of its kind in the Merge genre, and similar events have since been seen in Seaside Escape and Gossip Harbor.

Secret Supply events encourage players to drain premium currency. They usually appear a little before big revenue spikes, potentially because they encourage players to purchase the premium Battle Pass plan after spending their previous reserves.

Circus Caper Decoration Event

Circus Caper is a limited-time decoration event that features an exclusive (separate) merge area and offers narrative scenes and cosmetic rewards linked to the game’s traveling circus theme.

Players can access a special circus-themed merge grid in the Circus Caper decoration event. To open the grid, players need to set up a portal (an item granted to the player upon the beginning of the event) on their main progress merge grid.

In the event area, players can work on various merge chains originating from different item generators. As they progress, they eventually generate pieces of the main point chains, the chain of mergeable items that can be either collected for points by double tapping or further merged to get even more points from these items.

The points collected from collected items help progress the event’s main reward threshold. At the end of each decoration event instance, players are offered a chance to extend the duration of the event by +2 days. They can do so by paying a set, real money price. When they extend, the players will also receive bonus rewards as a further incentive. 

Unlike in other decoration events, this reward track doesn’t feature multiple separate decoration items, but just one that you upgrade through progression. Players don’t own the item before they hit level 30 of the progression path, giving them an incentive to keep playing until (and beyond) level 30. Without the item, their upgrade progression doesn’t count. 

Circus Caper is an example of an event with unique mechanics that make the gameplay experience deeper and more integrated.

PvE Limited-Time Modes

Metacore added some new limited-time PvE Modes to the game. Previously, Merge Mansion had different instances of these modes active, maybe two to four times a month, and they never overlapped. That said, if you look at the calendars for December and January, there are noticeably more rotations, overlapping events, and higher overall volumes.

Compared to other merge games, Merge Mansion’s Limited-Time PvE Modes are also richer in content and armed with unique mechanics. Other merge games have tended to focus more on linear progression where you need to find new merge item levels. Essentially, you merge until you reach the top level and get rewards through that progression (see Travel Town or Gossip Harbor).

However, Merge Mansion has several overlapping goals, including filling progression bars, side quests, and narration sequences, and collecting special items for separate collections (e.g., rare gems, fish, artifacts, etc.—each filling the separate collection albums).

Supercharge

Another successful event, first appearing in August 2024, is Supercharge, a boost event where players can supercharge their producers to create items faster and with higher levels. The event is designed to help players progress more quickly through the game by boosting the output of their regular item-producing mechanisms. 

Players can turn the supercharge feature on or off at any time, but when enabled, it doubles the production speed and allows producers to create higher-level items. The supercharge status is indicated with a distinctive lightning bolt icon on supercharged items.

This event does not have specific rewards, but activating the supercharge accelerates progression in the game. Players who use supercharge will run out of energy faster, which drives the sale of energy and thus overall monetization.

Supercharge first started with durations of a few days (generally two), but recently, we’ve seen a massive increase in the duration of the event. Shortly after this change, Supercharge was officially made into a permanent feature in the game—it was no longer tied to limited-time availability, and instead something players can toggle on or off by choice.

The Hopewell Bay Challengers

The Hopewell Bay Challengers is a new competitive solo leaderboard tournament. Merge Mansion previously featured three events in this category, all following the same archetype. This new event is the first one differentiated from the bunch.

Briefly, the tournament introduces progression through stages where players compete in one-hour merging rounds on a separate merge board, with leaderboard placement after each round contributing to their overall event progress.

The event also has some additional things worth mentioning. It features an additional “rewards” window, where players can track their overall event point progress to see which reward they will receive based on their current point count at the end of the event. 

It uses a special blue energy, which refills at the start of each round and drops from the main board only during an active round. The event energy can be earned when merging two items, from which one will indicate the blue energy symbol. The event also features a special shop with bundle offers of additional blue energy, gems, and event items.

Lessons and Takeaways from Merge Mansion 

Overall, Merge Mansion saw a consistent positive impact by doubling down on their live event strategy. They’ve increased the number of offered events, as well as innovated on the types of events. Here are the major takeaways from their standout events: 

1. Battle Pass is a major revenue driver: Revenue spikes consistently correlate with the beginning or end of Battle Pass periods, often accompanied by various in-app purchase (IAP) offers.
2. Events should always support monetization: Focus on events that encourage premium currency usage & faster energy depletion.
3. Unique mechanics can encourage battle pass engagement: “Circus Caper” introduces a separate merge area and upgradeable item tied to the battle pass. This is an example of how new events can deepen gameplay and create incentives for battle pass participation.
4. There are benefits to increasing rotation and overlapping of PVE Limited-Time Modes: Merge Mansion now features more frequent and overlapping PVE modes with richer content and unique mechanics than competitors focusing on linear progression.
5. A Differentiated Competitive Tournament: This new competitive solo leaderboard event introduces progression through timed merging rounds on a separate board with unique mechanics like blue energy and a reward track, diversifying their competitive offerings.

If you’d like to learn more about the LiveOps strategy of top games, check out GameRefinery’s Live Events Tracker or you can book a demo with a member of the GameRefinery team.

The post How Metacore Scaled Merge Mansion With a Stellar Live Event Strategy appeared first on GameRefinery.

We started working with GameRefinery in 2020 after following and reading its blog posts and snapshot reports.

Identifying Game Features to Make a Profitable and Successful Game

We know that the key to creating outstanding games is understanding both market trends and your competitors. Thanks to GameRefinery’s easy-to-use platform, we’ve gained valuable insight into what makes a successful mobile game. From there, we’ve been able to create a benchmark for what makes good games even better. The range of available features and data is impressive, and we appreciate how easy it is to use.  We also really like the frequent news and market trends updates. 

When we began working with them, the GameRefinery team thoroughly analysed two of our games, Spades and Dominoes. Their input helped us decide what additional features were needed to make these titles even more entertaining for our players.

Final words

GameRefinery has helped us identify suggested features to implement into our games, making the platform an integral part of our design workflow process. The product managers and game designers now use the platform to analyse and improve our current portfolio of live titles and upcoming ones.

The post How GameRefinery Helped Gazeus Games Identify Profitable Features for its Games appeared first on GameRefinery.

Our game My Fantasy: Choose Your Story, has been the 2nd most downloaded interactive story game in the US and Australia since November 2021. With over 2 million users to date, My Fantasy allows users to explore and fulfil their fantasies through interactive storytelling.

Thanks to GameRefinery, we have significantly reduced the time to create GDDs and ensured our game would appeal as much to new players as it does to our established player base.

Identifying our main competitors and player archetypes

We began by looking at My Fantasy competitors on GameRefinery and selecting games such as Tabou Stories, Lovelink and Covet Fashion with similar game mechanics. We looked into the competitions’ player archetypes and found that one of the most significant archetypes was ‘thrill seeker’.

With this information, we looked at our player base and noticed how our own ‘thrill seeker’ audience share was far behind. We found this surprising as My Fantasy has some of the same game mechanics that our competitors do.

Through GameRefinery data, we were also able to identify one of the primary motivations of our users is expression through customisation and decoration.

Developing new game mechanics and meta-game for our players

Thanks to the information we gathered through GameRefinery, we found valid references and implementation examples of different game mechanics in key competitors’ games. 

Armed with these valuable insights, we decided to develop new interactive stories to make sure we satisfied the expressionists’ needs. So now, after each level,  players can customise characters and spaces with new clothes, makeup and room decoration. And for our thrill-seekers, we went ahead and developed a whole new meta.

Not only did we improve our game with the insights we gathered from player archetype analysis, but we also created a theme across all of our creative material and ads that integrated our players’ motivations.

The post How GameRefinery Helped Genesis Backed Holy Water Develop a Metagame to Grow Their Audience appeared first on GameRefinery.

Our initial business model involves building lookalike audiences that game UA teams use to expand their spender targeting on major advertising platforms. We build lookalikes derived from Lootcakes members that spend in games that are competitive with or share key elements with our client’s game. With GameRefinery’s slick tools and insanely deep features analysis, we’re able to build lists of games based on gameplay mechanics, meta-game features, IP usage, monetization approach, user demographics, and a host of other elements. We then create our lookalikes based on the Lootcakes members who are spenders in those games.

GameRefinery helps us with complex analysis, but also makes life very simple by providing features like “Competitors” which crunches all of their data and quickly spits out a smart list of a games’ top competitors. Also, internally we’ve adopted GameRefinery’s game classification system which is more precise and market-relevant than the genre classifications of the app stores.

When we first realized what GameRefinery was doing we were both relieved and excited. Relieved because gone was the need for Lootcakes to build out its own team to deep dive into the features of top-grossing games. Excited, because we saw that we could combine our unique spender data with their unique game features data to accelerate the growth of our business. With GameRefinery’s help, Lootcakes is now providing its UA lookalike audiences for eight of the US Top 100 Grossing games. In 2020, game publishers are spending tens of millions of dollars targeting these smartly-built audiences. Lootcakes + GameRefinery is a match made in game data heaven!

Find out how the data could work for you, speak to our experts

The post How GameRefinery Helped Lootcakes Accelerate Growth appeared first on GameRefinery.

That’s why we wanted to enhance the social aspects of our mid-core live games in our line-up with a bunch of updates. But developing those features can be really costly and time consuming if not scoped properly, and we wanted to keep an agile mindset and a high velocity.

Our goal was not to develop a long list of social features, but to identify which ones had value in similar games to develop ours efficiently.

Thanks to GameRefinery, we managed to identify key social features that have a high impact with a reasonable implementation cost.

Identifying our market and main competitors

We started by shaping our market, selecting games of a similar genre to the ones we wanted to update with social features.

That view allowed us to also look at the global trends in terms of social features regarding this segment, in order for us to shape the needs and crucial features; again to answer our production constraints.

Breaking down social features per game

Once we had identified games that share the same market and players types as ours, we add them to our followed list to study in detail their social features, the game mode links and their effect on their Powerscore.

Looking at feature implementations

With the Game Analysis of followed games, GameRefinery allows us to have access to in-game screenshots of integrated features in a matter of seconds.

It’s particularly useful to have a glimpse of the rules, UI integrations, and overall implementation of those elements in other games.

First Time User Experience videos is another tool we used in order to see what other developers were doing with social features, by showcasing it to the players quite early in the game experience.

It also gave us ideas on how teach those elements to our players.

Final Words

Thanks to GameRefinery, we managed to identify key social features that have a high impact with a reasonable implementation cost.

We also did a study about their implementation in the UI but also in the FTUE and tutorial, which helped us find the best way to present those social features in terms of User Experience.

Once pushed live, those social features had a huge impact on player engagement in our games without the need to iterate through many updates to find the right way to add social in our experiences.

Find out how the data could work for you, speak to our experts

The post How GameRefinery Helped Ubisoft Find The Right Social Features appeared first on GameRefinery.

A part of making any mobile game a lasting success is to understand how to use LiveOps to nurture your game. We sat down with Corey Klein, Studio Strategy Manager at FoxNext, to discuss a little about how GameRefinery’s Update Impacts helps him track what the competition is doing and plan how their roadmap can deliver the most impact.

The Benefits of GameRefinery’s Update Impacts

One of the challenges of analyzing games as a service is that you’re tracking games over time. Where I see the value in GameRefinery’s Update Impacts is that with GameRefinery, we can quickly isolate when different features are updated over time, the implementations of the feature changes, the calendar date when they were updated, and the normalized days since the game’s release.

Update Impacts even takes this a step further. You can quickly see what impact an update had to help you pinpoint and prioritize which features to add and when. This gives you the tools to map a development timeline and business model for when you can expect to add these features to your product. Using the included tags, you can also do the same to support planning the frequency of events and content updates for your LiveOps.

For example, let’s say you’re considering planning on implementing a Guild Wars feature in your game. With Update Impacts, you can quickly see how many days post-release each of your competitors added the feature. Then if you believe that Guild Wars, or another feature, is critical for your service plans, you can see: What is a competitive timeline for its implementation, how many games had it at launch, how many games added it post-launch, which games saw the greatest lift in their Powerscore and RPI’s upon adding the feature, and how the implementations by more successful games compare to the implementations by less successful games.

The Result

Although the information on version updates and even descriptions is readily available elsewhere, they don’t directly identify and isolate the different feature changes. And it’s not always apparent from an update description whether a feature has changed, or even if several features have changed. This creates a lot of manual follow up work. With Update Impacts, not only does this feature save me a lot of time but I can be confident that we have a comprehensive understanding of each game’s roadmap in the market.

Find out how the data could work for you, speak to our experts!

The post How GameRefinery helps FoxNext Games plan their LiveOps roadmap appeared first on GameRefinery.

Let’s start with your daily workflow, how does GameRefinery fit in?

I use GameRefinery daily to stay up to speed on the mobile gaming market.  I check my emails every morning to see if any new games have entered the top 200. So that I’m able to see what other games are doing in the genre I’m working on – usually mid-core games, e.g., 4X and RPGs.

One of the tools I use the most is Market Share because it helps us find the right categories for new projects. We can look at Market Share for really valuable insights, to see if there are new games in the West or if there are changes in the top competitors of each category.

Is there something unique that only GameRefinery’s market data can help you with?

GameRefinery helped us understand what type of game art style is the perfect fit for our game. When we were working on a 4x game, we checked whether competitors are using realistic or cartoony art styles more, or whether they are making fantasy games or modern games. So it was handy to see what other top grossing games are doing in terms of art style – it’s how we found our art style direction.

Visual Explorer was useful for identifying app icon trends as well, and Game Names helped us find the right keywords for a unique fresh title. It gave us the tools to look into the optimal length of titles in the 4x category. For example, we found that games with an average of three words (with a combined character length of 15-20 characters) had a higher top grossing rank and that there were some common keywords these games are using.

Have GameRefinery’s tools helped you find inspiration?

GameRefinery’s tools that cover implementations are great for ideas.

Implementation Examples is excellent for seeing how other games implement their features, which gave us ideas on how we can execute the same feature in different ways and make ours unique. 

Likewise, FTUE videos help me gain inspiration from Eastern markets. The industry is moving faster there, and western games often follow trends that were already pioneered a year earlier in the East. But I don’t have access to those games here (and I don’t speak Chinese). GameRefinery’s First Time User Experience videos let me see the first 10-15 minutes of gameplay and the included tags explain the progression of gameplay. Thanks to FTUE videos I know what’s happening, what players are doing, whether it’s core game or an in-game shop. All valuable insights.

How does GameRefinery help guide your decisions?

GameRefinery doesn’t just help us with research and major design choices. Having GameRefinery’s data even helps us with simple decisions. For example, some in the team were wondering whether we should or shouldn’t have gachas in this type of game. Based on the data, it was clear that gachas are a common mechanic in all top grossing games, and with a really high revenue impact as well. So after presenting the team with the data, it was a no brainer to convince everyone.

When we have opinions and ideas about something, it’s good to back those up with data. Especially when we have a couple of ideas coming from everyone, it’s essential to know what other games are doing to see if we’re on the right path. GameRefinery supports our decision-making process because we can use all of these things we can’t find on other platforms to drive our decisions.

Would you like to learn more and see the service in action? Book a demo here

The post How GameRefinery Helps Guide Decisions At Rovio appeared first on GameRefinery.

Could you tell us about your experience working with GameRefinery’s combination of feature demographics and feature data?

Feature demographics is a brilliant new tool from GameRefinery. With data available for any mobile game, there are strong synergies when combined with GameRefinery’s subgenres and feature data. The best part is that by using them together, we can break down the market and see which games appeal to which demographics. This way, we can look for features that attract specific demographics and deconstruct a game’s demographic on a feature level.

One of the key use-cases this provides us is that we can use these demographic insights to match games and concepts with our current audience to find marketing and cross-promotion synergies. And we’ll be able to take demographic appeal into account when making new games and see if they slot into our existing user base, or if they appeal to a new audience where we could expand.

What do you think are the key benefits of feature-based Demographics?

Feature-based demographics opens many doors in game development, game research, competitive research, UA, and even M&A – because now we’ll be able to look at both economic and demographic factors to see if a game fits our portfolio.

What is particularly useful is that this type of data makes it easier to communicate with game teams when working with player personas. Because we have data that says that this type of feature and this type of style is more appealing to this demographic, so that’s where our developers can use GameRefinery as a guide for what they should be doing.

GameRefinery’s feature demographics can, therefore, help guide the feature development of games in our portfolio by helping us find features that are attractive to our core target groups.

How have you benefited from GameRefinery in MAG’s feature development and prototyping?

GameRefinery has made our prototyping more accurate, and it’s sped up the process. We create prototype games in the Game Analyzer tool, and our development teams add live games into the analyzer to play around with how different features would impact the game’s potential market performance. Feature demographics make this even more powerful because we can see how adding certain features would impact the core audience of the game in terms of demographic appeal. 

What we really like about Game Analyzer is that it’s like opening a box of legos – you get a sense of all the pieces you have to play with, without having to start from scratch every time you start a new project.

Demographics is a component of the GameRefinery service. Would you like to learn more and see it in action? Book a demo here

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