Any industry needs rankings of its best and worst performers based on several KPIs. And one of the greatest places to observe this is the video games analytics.
When a handful of platforms are selling products of that industry and these platforms share voluntarily or not their data, it makes the production of the next big hits way more competitive at the top: the ones who can analyse what work go very quick to develop copies of the best performers, making each iteration, each game, less profitable as you won’t stay without competitors for a long time, you can’t stay below the radar in such an industry.
https://www.appannie.com I remember the first time I showed App Annie to colleagues, and then my boss mentionned this service to our then CEO, he just couldn’t believe such a service could exist. In which industry do you have access to so much fresh data of absolutely all the competitors, except if you work with the Stock Market? The fact that you could monitor iPhone and Android ranking of all apps because so many apps decide to share their stats with App Annie, who then compares that with the official app store rankings to guess the downloads and revenues of the other apps whose ranking is known but didn’t share their stats, that was fantastic. Nowadays, App Annie is unfortunately so expansive that it could be viewed as a big problem for creativity: only the rich can access the knowledge necessary to understand who is getting the most downloads, why, how. On the plus side, it also means that the poor fools lonely developers can sometimes be less tempted to just copy the latest trend because getting to know this trend is just too expensive.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz
interesting article about indie game developers:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-15-g2a-interview
a16z podcast about the state of videogames industry:
https://a16z.com/2019/10/16/trends-revolutionizing-games
Sullygnome.com: Twitch Analytics
Steamspy.com: Very interesting, especially to compare with Steamdb.info:
Steamdb.info: ranking video games usage, downloads, trends from Steam Platform. Love it for the possibility to see for your own profile the cost of each game divided by the total time spent on the game, giving a price per hour. Example: for my gamer profile:
https://steamdb.info/calculator/76561198123571172/?cc=eu
Super interesting article about the peak reached by the hypercasule mobile games: https://mobiledevmemo.com/has-the-hypercasual-game-genre-peaked/