The Great Mobile Convergence

What the report says

Imagine a day in the life of a modern mobile gamer. They begin by browsing Facebook or Instagram, see a cool card battler that whets their midcore appetite, and they download it. On launch, it’s published by… Voodoo? Later in the day, they’re in the mood for competition. So they join an intense 30-minute PVP tournament in… a match-3. To wrap up their day, they relax by playing a hypercasual simulator… in a 4X.None of this is hypothetical. In fact, you can play Voodoo’s Draft Showdown right now. Then you can enjoy PVP events like Power Rush, Sky Race, and more in Royal Match and Royal Kingdom.

Then you can tend to your Hypercasual hospital simulator in Last Asylum.If those examples haven’t made it clear, here’s the lede: mobile games are converging. The boundaries between the traditional product models — Hypercasual, Casual, and Midcore — are breaking down. Features and mechanics that were previously deemed too “core” or too “casual” have and will continue to creep across genre boundaries.Hypercasual publishers are building toward deeper progression and IAP spending. The table above shows the top 10 games in Voodoo’s portfolio by IAP revenue for the trailing 12 months, showing three Midcore titles accounting for 33% of revenue.Casual leaders are adding competition, cooperation, and social obligation.

Meanwhile, 4X developers are widening their funnels through idle and hypercasual-style onboarding.Mobile games are increasingly converging around the same objective: combining hypercasual-scale accessibility with midcore-scale retention and monetization, or what we call Accessible Depth.The reason why? As we wrote in our recent Mobile F2P newsletter, “while mobile gaming can still generate commercially meaningful launches, few become the durable next-generation incumbents.” To succeed in a world where games are competing with an endless array of other media distractions, publishers need products that are easier to acquire, harder to exhaust, and capable of supporting years of engagement and spending.In this article, we’ll look at three product models — Hypercasual, Casual, and Midcore — examine what publishers have been doing to reach Accessible Depth, and come up with a new formula for success.HypercasualHypercasual publishers are the masters of reaching a huge audience with appealing and simple mechanics.

Key details

They are now leveraging this skill set and aiming for deeper and more monetizable genres, distilling the essence to reach a mass market without sacrificing depth. In a sense, they are taking a page from Supercell’s playbook but applying it with an even greater degree of simplification.Voodoo’s Castle Clashers’ simplistic cartoon graphics belie a deep deck-building system and competitive PVP environment. Homa’s Harvest King condenses tower defense by removing positioning and adding an interesting energy mechanic with its sprinklers.This strategy isn’t even all that new. Voodoo released Mob Control in 2021. It began as a genuinely Hypercasual game with level-based progression and has since morphed into a full-fledged Midcore-lite experience.

We interviewed Miguel Santirso, GM of the Barcelona studio behind the hit, two years ago. Even from its early beginnings, Voodoo already had a long-term vision of what it wanted the game to be. In his words, Voodoo wanted to “make it fun for the long term, and to make it resilient,” and that “Mob Control will be, in two to three years, next to the top Midcore games.”Fellow Hypercasual publisher SayGames has a similar progression with Tower Wars, which was released in 2021 and has slowly evolved into a Midcore-lite experience. It is now SayGames’ biggest game by IAP revenue, with $34M in lifetime revenue.

SayGames has also been chasing the Midcore market for a while, and it could be considered one of the pioneers. It published BlackDeck, a CCG that launched all the way back in 2019, making it SayGames’ second-highest game by all-time IAP revenue, at $30M, according to Sensor Tower.The trend is spreading across Hypercasual. Homa, Tripledot (particularly after it acquired AppLovin’s studios), Azur Game Studios, Rollic, along with others, have either added a midcore-lite title in their portfolios or have incorporated midcore mechanics and monetization like gacha, PVP, ranked modes, deep upgrade systems, and so on.While we cannot attribute this growth entirely to the incorporation of midcore hooks, Hybridcasual and Hypercasual games have increased their share of mobile game revenue from 3.1% to 7.9% over three years, while total game revenue has remained relatively flat.CasualRoyal Match reset expectations for what a Casual game could be when it eschewed a full-fledged meta for a dense live-ops strategy.

More from the announcement

Since then, Casual leaders like Dream, Microfun, and Scopely have made competition, cooperation, collections, and social obligation — features that were once the domain of Midcore games — essential to the experience.Below is a calendar for the recurring weekly events in Royal Match.