What game is most trendy currently?

I think success like Minecraft is more down to chaos theory. someone that played it or reviewed it was the 'tipping point' which caused the runaway success. Infiniminer was just unlucky in that it never hit that tipping point.

 

It's worth noting that the author had developed the game using .NET and released it in an unobfuscated state. This allowed people to "steal" the source to create their own clients and servers. The author abandoned it soon after.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01/20/proto-minecraft-abandoned-due-to-epic-error/

What's interesting is that roughly the same thing happened to Minecraft but notch largely ignored it and even stated a few times that he was interested in supporting modding in a more active way (though he never did so as far as I know).

 

Simulation as in 'the sim's, simulations of people ... not sure about like sim city or what

 

Here's what I found..
http://www.realitymine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/age-distribution.png?f29246
https://62e528761d0685343e1c-f3d1b9...9543/area14mp/image-20150723-22816-63g4ur.png

Graphic age vs genre is quite a lot of data, you might be better off picking a target demographic e.g. by genre first, and then googling for age data for that genre only.

Like this for example - clash of clans (I googled for tower defense demographic age) ...
https://clanmoors.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/midcore-demographics.png
Notice that clash of clans clearly targets MEN and is not attempting to acquire a female audience, as evidenced by all of the gameplay and battle imagery and so on. Pleasing everyone doesn't usually work because it makes you too 'distant' from exactly fitting with anyone wants.

Or here's a couple for 'puzzle' genre:
http://developers.magmic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/chart.png
https://braxwolf.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/puzzle-solving.jpg
Notice here the first puzzle game is 78% female. You better be sure your puzzle game targets female mindsets, behaviors, values, ways of processing data, visual appeal etc. Don't be making a 'puzzle game for men' and expect to get very far because it won't fit with 'what men want' very well.

Narrow your search by genre.

Also note you could ask 'what is the best genre' or 'what is a popular genre' but you really should ask, WHO is the genre popular with. There could be great popularity in a genre appealing to a certain demographic. Clash of clans is popular with men, puzzle games are popular with women.. you'll be harder pressed to find something that's popular 'in general' with everyone.

 

I think if you want to know about trends and genre popularity then you either need to find some hard factual data or some graphs/charts of that data.. not listen to individual people with biased opinions. You need a statistical trend from a large enough sample of relevant people.

Also note that 'trendy' means it is increasing in popularity fast, which could mean it's not popular but is becoming popular, or is very popular and is going through the roof. But also trendiness isn't necessarily 'stickiness'. Look at what happens on the iOs app store when a 'trendy game' gets to the #1 spot... yes, it enjoy some days/weeks of mega trendy popularity but then.... fizzle, fade, die, to be replaced by whatever is trendier now. The success is short lived. You also see this in other industries, like in music where someone is a superstar that later crashes and burns. If you 'burn bright' you burn fast. Why not target a less trendy, less popular, but most long-term stable and consistently supported genre? You've got to be able to work fast and anticipate a short-lived lifespan if you're going for trendy.

 

I think most indie can't do market research. Because it is too time-consuming and require special knowledge to analyze properly. Require guys from consulting company, require enormous money.

And after analyze market, what is left? You just get past's record, not current, not present. And you should fight with present people's mind, not past mind. And that present mind is always changing. I should see the future, not past. Past is just reference. Deep analyze is useless and not be help to indie mostly.

Most indie just start from his very own one guy's mind or just few guy's talking. They probably did not care about majority out there at all. Most just start from his very own unique experience and because he felt fun in specific game, genre, he started to make like that game. With his own tweak. That's all.

There is no heavy market research at all.

The monster we should fight against is continuously evolving. Past record of his shape and battle strategy based on that is useless.

But I don't want to say that is useless 100%.

 

I disagree mainly in that while you can't see the future you can at least see where the past indicates reliable trends or patterns or facts which are consistent over time, and are therefore likely to remain the same in future. Like, the fact is that most puzzle games are played by women, as are most slot machine games, so it is likely this will remain true for the next few years at least. It would be a safe bet to then make a puzzle game for women.

Also market research doesn't just mean research the market, it means research the audience, the people, what kinds of people are out there and what kind of games do they prefer and play. You can get a lot of insight from that. And it is definitely far better than having on insight at all. For example I was making a game that I thought women would like but when I started looking at what women look for in gaming and what kind of games they play and so on, it became glaringly obvious that many aspect of the game were really what I as a man would prefer and was not at all geared towards women. So that would've meant it would be a flop due to being inconsistent and unclear on who exactly the audience is.

It doesn't cost anything to do this research. Just google for charts and data that other companies already released. Look at what games are ranking on marketplaces, look at how many reviews they get, look at what genres the top games are etc... there's a lot of ways to get insight into what the market is without having to spend money or have a crystal ball.

I think when people DON'T do any research and they have no real clue who the audience really is or what niche they're targeting and they don't ask themselves whether ALL parts of the game align with that, they come out with a product that's basically 'blind' and then it's a sheer matter of LUCK a s to whether it is successful or not. You might accidentally have appealed to a demographic and it might not even be the one you thought would like it. For example endless runner games are generally considered gender neutral, based on factual data, liked equally by men and women, but this might not be what you 'expect' or imagine. I would've thought women would not like those games as much because they are more action oriented, but hey. The purpose of the research is to find out the unexpected and be open to being wrong about what you thought was right.

 

When your audience is within a 60/40 split of gender I would say it's mostly neutral. Clash of titan might have try to appeal to men first, but they didn't put off women by putting aggressively sexy woman character either. Casual games had found that only focusing on a core audience will shrink sales around the hardcore over time and will leave a brand dry and too complex for newcomer, continuing hemorrhaging customer.

Appealing to an audience is much more nuance than focusing on the target demographics, even when they are the core you still grow by having your secondary audience happy. Because the ideal aggregate audience profile is only a caricature of each member of that audience, the actual member can vary a lot.

 

Thanks @imaginaryhuman I will do research after weekend as a lot of work is ahead of me currently. I tried without success so far but with your approach I might success instead of games genre Ill target similar games.

 

The Indie who develops a game because he thinks "its cool" actually does the only sane thing.

1) It's not totally unreasonable to make the conclusion "If I like it, there must be others out there that like it too"... that might not be enough to find the millions of customers needed to bring a RoI for a 100m $ AAA development.
But then, if you only spent 50k $ on development, if you find 50k customers paying you 10$ for your game will give you already a nice RoI.

2) An Indie dev invests A LOT of himself into his game, especially if he does fill multiple roles. He also takes a considerable risk with it.
Working on a game like that if you despise what you build is not healthy, and will most probably result in a subpar game.

3) Trying to find out future trends is fortune telling even with the biggest market research funds available. As you said, without it, you can spend a TON of time trying to read the market, and you could most probably just as well use a random number generator to come up with results and have about the same accuray.

Remember, the CURRENT situation is not that important if you develop anything that takes longer than about 6 months to finish. In a year, situation might be completly different. Maybe VR Devices have been announced in the meantime, and are the new craze? Maybe VR Devices came out in the Meantime and bombed? Maybe you started development for VR Platform X which sounded like the shizzle at the time, but now a new VR Platform Y has been surprise released and everyone is abandoning platform X for the much improved platform Y?

You can try to inform yourself, and stay abreast of new developments. Even then, what sticks and what bombs nobody can say.


There have been MANY examples on Indie devs trying to be the first on a new platform and getting burned. See Ouya for example. It sounded great at the time!
And in all honesty, it could have worked out differently. It wasn't necessarily anything particularly bad that made that platform fail.


What IS important for the Indie dev on the other hand is finding a niche and making sure his games are different from the myriad of offers in his tier of games.
And THAT is something every Indie can do. Check out what other games do, just to make sure you make something DIFFERENT (Which is opposed to what market research normally does). Granted, you don't know what other devs are cooking at the moment, but this way you at least do not release into a niche that has already long standing competition.



TL; DR: Concentrate on what will sell truckloads when you NEED to sell truckloads. When you spend 100mio $ for developing your game, and can only ask for 60$ per customer, you need MANY customers.
When you are an Indie, don't try to sell truckloads. Sure, would be nice. Its more important that you sell ANYTHING at all. So make sure you differentiate and find your niche, and don't waste too much time on trying to find the biggest market.

If you hope to win the jackpot Minecraft style with your Indie game, don't waste time on market research... push out as many good games in as little time as possible. Just as with the lottery, trying to guess the numbers is useless, buying more lottery tickets on the other hand DOES improve your chances (not by much, still).

 

There are also successful outliers - which doesn't mean it's good to buck the known/common trend (most puzzle games are played by women) but can be a motivator to incorporate genre defining mechanics into a 'type' of game in an attempt to broaden the appeal of a specific genre towards a different demographic.

Puzzle Quest is one I'm thinking of. I'm not a puzzle game player, however when I first encountered Puzzle Quest I was intrigued by the rpg aspects of the game and picked it up. I think because of the simple rpg vibe/mechanics added to the match 3 type game, made this game very fun to me and many other males.