How to Create 'Hyper-Casual' Games for Marketing

Hyper-casual games have improved the mobile gaming experience in an unexpected way.

Hyper-casual games are known for their simple gameplay and minimal design, as well as the in-game features remaining minimal.

In this article, we will be discussing the significant factors to consider while creating hyper-casual games for marketing campaigns.

How to Create A Hyper-Casual Game

Many factors should be taken into account while undergoing hyper-casual game development. Some of the key points are highlighted below.

The following are the most essential attributes that must be added in a hyper-casual game marketing strategy.

Avoid Distractions

While creating a hyper-casual game, you need to keep it simple. When a user clicks on your game campaign, they want to get right into the gameplay rather than get bogged down in campaign-related details.

If you add too many marketing prompts and hurdles at the beginning of your game, then your player will start losing interest & attention.

Time is money, and no one likes to waste their time on things that are unnecessary. So, it is best to add marketing mumbo jumbo at the end of gameplay and keep loading times to a minimum.

Anything beyond a 5 second load time and you will start to see a drop-off rate occur. If your game takes more than 5 seconds to load, your campaign will likely lose 25-40% of potential mobile gamers.

Even choosing to have a quick HTML5 game format over a game app is important, as there can be a large drop-off rate between users accessing app stores, downloading mobile apps and actually opening/playing the game.

Minimal Design

The core of hyper-casual games lies in simplicity. While creating your hyper-casual game campaign, make sure that all the features are kept simple, in some cases even leaving branding purely for pages either side of gameplay.

In the same vein, keep the controls and features of your game simple. Nothing is more jarring than a simple-looking game with layers of complex gameplay baked into it.

These games are for mobile devices, so do not flood the screen with unnecessary details.

Keep the Game Design Marketing Focused

For a hyper-casual game sitting within a marketing campaign, the build should be a funnel system with the end goal of getting customer conversions by the end of the user experience.

The goal should be to design an eye-catchy title page with branding sitting within, the game should be visually pleasing with gameplay being almost universally intuitive for users.

After the game has finished, this is where you present a data field to users, prompting them to submit details with incentives such as prize-pools and leaderboards.

The first impression is the last impression. If a user downloads your game, but the design looks cheap & nasty, the gameplay is messy, and the incentives are underwhelming, the users will not participate any further, even if it is a free to play experience.

How to Promote your Gamified Campaign?

Building a game alone is not enough for a campaign to be a success, there needs to be a properly planned and executed mobile marketing promotional campaign in order to draw users in.

Understand Your Market

If you want to make your hyper-casual game launch successful, then it is vital that you have in-depth knowledge and understanding of the market and how it works.

Hyper-casual games can become viral quickly, yet you need to understand that the hyper-casual market is crowded. This means you need to define what will set your game apart from the sea of others.

Set goals beforehand/Have a clear objective

Is your Gamified Marketing Campaign designed for the purpose of educating clients on a new product or service? Creating hype around the brand? Selling more units of a product or simply creating awareness? Having one clear priority helps give the campaign direction.

You would be surprised how often Brands feel the need to launch a marketing campaign, yet never take the time to identify what it is they hope to achieve. Simply making noise in the hopes of staying in front of mind with your customer base is not a long-term goal.

Understand the Needs of Your Audience

Before launching and marketing your game, you need to understand the needs and demands of your targeted audience.

Understanding what makes your targeted audience tick will help you to plan out how you will cater to them with your game campaign.

Age, gender, interests & location all matter when choosing a game. Some games have a user percentage that can be 85% male, while others are 70% female. Knowing who your audience is, allows you to allocate the right kind of game in order to reach that demographic.

Know what success looks like through setting KPIs

Do you have set KPIs? Is it to get over 5 thousand plays or a million? Is it to get social shares and go “viral” and if so how much? Having a target to aim for helps focus all efforts on attaining those numbers.

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are exactly what they sound like, by setting KPIs in place before your Gamification Campaign goes live, you have created parameters and a direction for the campaign to move in.

Without KPIs, how do you get an accurate read on whether or not the campaign was a success? Set KPIs up first and it will help with all the following points all falling into place.

Promotion across relevant mediums/Create relevant content

Gamification marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all process, as what works to drive engagement on social media channels might stall on your website or in-store efforts. As you launch your gamification campaign, you should be mindful of where your target audience will be and what kind of content they will respond to.

Knowing how much money you’re willing to put into the promotional aspect of a Marketing Campaign not only helps you determine how wide of a net you’ll be casting but even where you choose to cast that net.

Make sure when you are planning a Gamification Campaign that you allocate the right amount of your marketing budget towards both content quality and Promotional Ads.

Determine incentives and rewards

Determine what you want to give away as an incentive. It could be a new product sample, content and guides to help the audience or promotional coupons. There needs to be a clear incentive in order to make the gamification work with your audience.

Rewards are a must for Gamification campaigns, as they require proactive engagement from users, so in order to get them over the line, there must be something on offer that would entice the users into giving the campaign their time and attention.

The best rewards are items and services that seem realistic and attainable. Some companies offer rewards that seem too extravagant, users see the value of the reward and subconsciously assume the work required for such a reward must be too great.