This year’s last episode of Games and Names, a games industry podcast launched by AppMagic in partnership with WN Media Group, wraps up 2023 for the mobile games market and the industry in general. Here is a recap of the main trends and the biggest challenges that developers and publishers have faced over the past 12 months.
In the eighth episode Games and Names co-hosts, AppMagic VP of product Stan Minasov and Product Madness senior game designer Jesse Kroon, were joined by two special guests from the MY.GAMES team — head of industry relations Anton Gorodetsky and senior business development manager Dmitriy Byshonkov.
Together, they summed up 2023 and looked back at what happened in the industry this year, especially compared to 2022.
Below are the main topics discussed during the episode:
- How 2023 marked a “correction of the market” after the pandemic years remembered for exponential growth, extensive hiring, and huge amounts of investment poured into the games industry;
- Mass layoffs as the worst part of this year, given the thousands of people who lost their jobs, but at the same time as a natural result of companies overstaffing themselves between 2020 and 2022;
- Why making bold predictions for 2024 based on the success of this year’s games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Monopoly Go, and Hogwarts Legacy is wrong;
- One of the biggest challenges that many game companies, including MY.GAMES, faced in 2023 was a significant decline in investment and “easy money” (especially for aspiring mobile studios that have to compete with existing hits with huge live ops teams behind them);
- Key trends in the mobile market, including the rise of “hybrid” games and the shrinking of the hyper-casual genre in its classic form;
- It is not getting any easier for new developers to make hits — the share of successful mobile titles among all new releases in the casual genre this year was just 0.29% (according to AppMagic data).
You can watch the full episode below or listen to it on: