Every time I open up my game industry newsfeed the word Hyper Casual is featured front and center. The biggest publishing/development name associated with Hyper Casual games right now is Voodoo. Their games have millions of downloads and enough revenue to make a small country jealous of their achievements. But why? Why are Voodoo games so popular?
Your Answer Upfront:
Voodoo Games or Hyper Casual games are popular due to the simplicity of their design. The games require no introduction, no tutorial and feature instant-feedback to any action while requiring very little thought. The gameplay is repeatable, almost consequence-free and extremely satisfying, offering instant gratification to the player during their short play session.
In this article we’ll look at Hyper Casual games and explain what they are, where they came from and what sparked the second gold rush in mobile gaming’s history. We’re also going to talk a bit about the principles behind Hyper Casual game design. By the end of this article you should have a pretty good idea why Hyper Casual games are so popular.
What Are Hyper Casual Games?
Hyper Casual games are a “new” breed of casual games. In short, you can think of them as the most casual games available in the casual genre. The design goal behind hyper casual games is that you need to understand how to play the game without any instructions or tutorials.
They usually feature extremely simple mechanics that can be understood instantly:
- Move your finger on the screen to control the character and dodge the enemies.
- Swipe up on the screen to launch the vehicle off a cliff.
- Tap the screen to make the bird jump.
Hyper Casual games are the anti-gamer games, designed for people who never experienced a game before and they thrive in a market dominated by people who are on their first interaction with a computing device (the smartphone).
What is the Difference Between Casual and Hyper Casual Games?
Casual games can have really in-depth mechanics that require a lot of thought and attention accorded to them. If you think casual games are easy, try to beat the final stages of Frozen: Free Fall or Candy Crush Saga. You need to understand what the environmental blockers do, how to stop snow cubes from spawning and how to unlock tiles via matches.
Hypercasual games, in contrast, are a lot more forgiving and lenient. Depth is skewed in favor of simplicity and instant gratification. There’s a saying in the Hyper Casual industry: If the player can lose, then he can get frustrated and quit the game early. And that’s a big no no.
Let’s look at how Hyper Casual games came to be and how exactly they managed to carve their own niche inside of the casual game’s market. We’ll start by looking at casual games first and then talk about that one game we all know that sparked this new gold rush in our beloved mobile gaming industry.
Casual Games Galore
The history of casual games dates back to the birth of the industry. Games never started out as something hardcore only and then sprang up to offer more casual versions.
Wikipedia mistakenly quotes Solitaire as being the first casual game hit and claims that Pac Man on the arcade machines may be the first “casual video game” due to it’s “cute cast of characters and a design sensibility that appealed to wider audiences than the shoot-em-up Space Invaders“.
If we define Casual Games as games them being “easy” to interact with and we’re not shying away from card games (as is Solitaire) than we can look back at Blackjack from 1977/78 for the Commodore PET as one of the first casual games.
Over the span of the 80’s and 90’s the gaming industry’s output of games evolved, ramping up production quality, budget and churning out ever more detailed and complex content. At the same time, a huge number of developers turned towards having more simpler offerings for those not looking to chase after high intensity gore fests.
As the 2000’s came and the internet became more common, casual games found their homes on web distribution websites, portals, in the vein of BigFishGames, PopCap and MumboJumbo.
Hidden Object Games, Word Games, Puzzle Games and Match 3 games like Bejewelled became the craze with a worldwide audience, a lot of the games being successful thanks to the emergence of technologies like Flash, which allowed dynamic content to be produced and experience inside of their web browser.
However, once smartphones exploded onto the scene, the casual games industry was turned upside down. Millions and then billions of people got access to a new device, a simple phone, with a big screen and enough computing power for appease their casual gaming cravings. Couple this with the ability to just one-tap download anything your heart desires with no need for upfront payments and you have a recipe for success.
This is the time where Candy Crush, Frozen: Free Fall, Angry Birds and Paper Toss were spearheading “Gaming For the Masses” and making bucks hand over fist.
Game designers and developers everywhere rushed to find new and interesting ways to leverage touchscreen gaming in a way that the majority of the install base could enjoy, without requiring any beforehand knowledge.
The general consensus, at least in my game dev circles, was that games need to be simple but still challenging, with a ton of depth that slowly gets revealed to the user. I worked on Frozen: Free Fall as a game designer and programmer back in early 2010’s and I remember how increasingly complex the game got as you advanced on the new maps.
You’d end up with tens of different Match-3 mechanics blended together with “blocker tiles” interacting together to create emergent challenges that even we, on the design team, didn’t expect. And yet we had people keeping up with the latest updates, going from what we lovingly called “suburban soccer moms and grannies” on level 1 to avid gamers that emailed the team asking for much more new content. At one point I remember the game’s producer telling me someone emailed us asking for a Gaming Pro diploma/certification for her daughter who finished the entire game without using a single In-App Purchase to get extra moves or lives.
What I don’t have from that time is data on how many players gave up on the game as soon as harder and harder mechanics and concepts started being introduced. Back then I wasn’t keen on data analytics and I never asked, but I’m sure that a big part of our users gave up way before reaching the summer levels.
This means that there was a big part of the market that would never experience content for games after more than 1-2 weeks of play. There was a big part of the market for which producing hundreds of hours of content would not provide a good return of investment.
As smartphones became ubiquitous and a major part of our daily lives, more and more game developers jumped on board, some of them releasing minor games, small releases, with a modicum of gameplay mechanics and little content production but high replay-ability. One of those games was Flappy Bird.
The Flappy Bird “Incident”
In 2013 a really simple casual game released on the market. It featured an extremely simple control scheme (tap to jump), a difficulty curve that no seasoned designer would embrace and side-scrolling graphics that would have made Nintendo lawyers brandish their weapons.
The game was difficult, but not unfair. You picked it up and instantly knew what to do and that it was your fault if you failed. And people ate it up. In less than a year it became an internet sensation.
And it’s not like the game was original in its gameplay mechanics, design or aesthetics. Other games came and went that were similar in their approach. Canabalt, by Finji, is such a game. If you take Canabalt at face value and, on paper, it’s a much better game from all perspectives. Technically, it features better graphics, more animations and a lot of feedback for the player’s actions. Gameplay-wise the game uses the same 1 tap control mechanic as Flappy Bird with the added bonus that momentum and arcs are taken into account. Graphically and aesthetically, the game is superior to Flappy Bird.
Canabalt was released before Flappy Bird. It’s technical prowess and gameplay mechanics are better than Flappy Bird’s and the graphics are better designed, integrated and leagues ahead of the simple graphics borrowed from the Super Mario franchise that Flappy Bird employs. And yet, Flappy Bird saw more installs, revenue and acclaim than Canabalt could ever have dreamed off.
But why?
Because in Flappy Bird you tapped and your bird was instantly going up or down. You didn’t need to get used to the jump timings and the arc of the jump like in Canabalt. You didn’t need to wait for a timer to complete and the camera never moved and trailed in front of the character.
The 1bit-ish Sci-Fi aesthetics of Canabalt didn’t appeal to so many people but the Super Mario-embraced look of Flappy Bird? That was something familiar. I’m pretty sure a lot of people installed the game because of the looks.
If Canabalt was a demake of platformers games then Flappy Bird was a demake of a demake. Canabalt was also a premium game while Flappy Bird didn’t have a barrier to entry. Just tap on Get and that’s it.
And the success of such a simple game left many seasoned game devs scratching their heads while inspiring a lot of newcomers. Clones started to pop-up extremely fast, Fly Bird, Tappy Bird, Flappy Happy and Birdy Flappy soon arrived on the market.
And with them many many more demakes of popular, classical, mechanics featuring extremely simple control and instant gameplay with 0 admission price.
Birth of a New Industry
What happened thanks to Flappy Bird and many more games that followed was a 180 degree turn of an entire game development industry. All the rules were broken and games were taken back to the simple nature of 80’s and 90’s titles.
A new industry was born, the Hyper Casual industry and companies like Voodoo, Ketchup and Kwalee focused on it faster than anyone expected.
In the 9 years since Flappy Bird’s release the Hyper Casual market has exploded with Hyper Casual games reaching the top charts and earning the title of the Most Downloaded Game across all mobile platforms.
Why Are Voodoo Games So Popular?
Voodoo Games or Hyper Casual games are popular due to the simplicity of their design. The games require no introduction, no tutorial and feature instant-feedback to any action while requiring very little thought. The gameplay is repeatable, almost consequence-free and extremely satisfying, offering instant gratification to the player during their short play session.
Voodoo Games are extremely popular because they are the anti-gamer games that appeal to people who never played games before. They don’t rely on preexisting knowledge of how games work and the little depth they offer is only served to those who really seek it. For everyone else the game expects nothing from you, other than to watch a few ads while you mindlessly swipe, touch and tap.
Now, we understand why Voodoo Games are popular but do you know how they get so popular and shown to so many users? We wrote an article on how games get popular that you might be interested in reading.
Where To Next?
I write extensively about the mobile gaming industry, their tactics and how greed influences a game’s design, subjects which were brought up in this post.
I believe that you might be interested in more articles on game monetization. So if you want to stick around, you can check out “How Do Free Mobile Games Make money“, “Why Do Mobile Games Have Fake Ads” and “Why Do Mobile Games Have In-App Purchases“.
There’s also a monster post (about 4000 words) that answers the question: “How Hard Is It To Make A Mobile Game“. It goes in depth with actual examples on how Experience, Resources and Financials affect the difficulty of developing and releasing new mobile games!
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