Browsing through the new releases on MochiMedia these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the most popular games genres are tower defence, “dress up” girl games and side scrolling, monster truck “stunt” driving games! Just because that’s what hundreds of newbie developers seem to be releasing doesn’t mean that’s what people want to play though!
Tower Defence I can understand, in fact some of the better tower defence games (such as Bloons Tower Defence or Desktop Tower Defence) are very popular at the moment, but there are 3 genres of browser games that are hugely popular, year after year. These types of games might not be groundbreaking, sexy or exciting, but they get hordes of players, and when well designed they tend to be guaranteed hits!
Last year MochiMedia ran a survey that showed the average casual gamer to be 43 years of age, and that 55% of players are female which goes some way to explain why arcade and strategy games don’t feature here. So, what are the 3 most popular genres…
Word Games
From the humble crossword to games like Word Reactor, words games are always popular, particularly with female players, and the older generations, word games attract large numbers of players and can be single or multi-player.
Since word games, in general, tend to be relatively simple to develop and with low overheads in terms of performance they are ideally suited to the Flash platform.
Card/Casino Games
Texas Hold’em on Facebook regularly attracts 15 million or more player per day! From Windows Solitaire to multi-player card games, this is an evergreen genre which always attracts players. The rules to many card and casino games are already well defined so you can spend less time tweaking and deciding on gameplay, and more time creating a polished experience.
Again since there is little in the way of graphical overhead these games are ideal for Flash, and work extremely well as browser based games.
Puzzle Games
Since Tetris is one of the best selling games of all time, it should come as no surprise that puzzle games are extremely popular online and attract huge numbers of players. Bejewelled, from PopCap games, has apparently been downloaded over 150 million times, and has sold over 35 million paid versions! Again, with a few exceptions, they tend not to be processor hungry and so are well suited to the Flash platform. While the term “Puzzle game” can encompass a wide range of game styles, generally they are 2 dimensional, and relatively simple both in terms of gameplay and development.
So, the next time you’re deciding on the next game you want to create, ask yourself what you want to achieve. If you want to push the boundaries, and create a new, funky arcade game great – but realise that while a word or puzzle game might not be as interesting to develop, it could end up being way more successful!
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