14 DAY TRIAL // Back in March, Google announced some changes to its Play Store, which were meant to make it easier for users to find the type of games they liked most.
Basically, Google turned the already existent 6 game genres that you could search in the Play store into no less than 18. Before the changes were applied, Android users could only search for games in 6 categories: Arcade & Action, Casual, Brain &Puzzle, Racing, Sports and Cards & Casino.
After the changes, new game sub-categories appeared: Casual, Arcade, Puzzle, Action, Racing, Sports, Simulation, Strategy, Adventure, Role Playing, Family, Casino, Trivia, Card, Word, Educational, Board and Music.
Given the changes, all games that were part of an older sub-category had to be moved to another one that would better define its genre. Many titles in the Arcade & Action sub-category switched to Role Playing, Action, Arcade and so on.
This seems to have created a massive shift in ranking and revenue for some games that were less known to the public. For example, Oak Game’s title Odd Socks was moved from Casual to the Family sub-category and that resulted in a huge ranking boost.
Although the game was ranked 125th in the global grossing charts in the old Casual category, after the update, it jumped more than 120 places and is now number 4 in the Family genre for the month of April.
A similar case is Zynga’s FarmVille 2: Country Escape, which made one of the biggest moves in ranks from rank 259 in March to rank 2 in April.
Nekki’s Shadow Fight 2 title achieved an amazing milestone as well by jumping from rank 222 in Arcade & Action category to number 2 in Role Playing sub-category for the month of April. GAMEVIL’s Monster Warlord also jumped from 302 rank (Arcade & Action) to 8 (Adventure) for the same month.
It’s also interesting to note that right after the update, Google Play’s Games revenue increased by more than 15%, which means that the changes had a rather positive impact.
According to Distimo’s statistics, the Role Playing genre showed the largest revenue share after the update, and Korean Kakao based games in particular, as well as Japanese RPG titles.
For developers, this means increased visibility for their games, especially for those titles that were “buried under more successful apps in a broader, more general category.”