Make no mistake. The last 12 months have seen a massive uplift in online gaming activity. As well as being the new ‘go-to’ way to relax, due to the versatility of the technology it can be played upon, there is also a massive array of business opportunities to make use of this interest.
Each of the genres has a slightly demographic for their typical users. For instance, if your affiliate deals were with beauty products, then posting material about Township with an 80% female user base would probably bring better results than Pokemon Go, which is more of a 50/50 split.
With that in mind, here is a run-down of some of the most popular genres, so you can pick which might be the best one to jump onto.
#1 Farming simulations
This is a very wide market with millions of users. Included in this is Township with is mentioned above and Stardew valley, which is a bit more old-school. These genres are based around managing a farm by growing crops, looking after animals, and then selling the resulting products to customers or manufacturing them into something else and, in turn, selling those.
For instance, you can grow wheat and sell it, or turn it into bread, cakes, or snacks and sell it for more. The simple gameplay means that players can be hooked quite quickly, and re-visiting the game every day is rewarded. The upgrading, building, and processing of each item in the game takes time, which can involve several hours of downtime.
The predominantly female player base search online for quick start guides and ways of speeding up play without using tokens
#2 Traditional Games
Rather than pull out the board games and dice or pack of cards, the online versions of games that have been played for a hundred years or even longer are still very popular. These tend to have a slightly older demographic but is very firmly split according to which games are being played.
While online versions of games like Monopoly and Scrabble seem to be played by both males and females equally when it comes to online Bingo, the bias is heavily female. Yet, casino type games like casino megaways slots can be predominately male.
#3 City builder war games
We are not talking about Minecraft or COD here; everybody knows about their massive popularity, so covering those would be unproductive. What we are looking at this time is a genre so popular that even the Game of Thrones franchise has joined in with their lookalike version. All of these games are based around founding a city, collecting resources to build a population and an army, then waging war on other players for points and stealing more resources.
A player can join co-ops for greater solidarity, and these games share the same issues with the farming simulations in that building and improving each element of the game takes time. Players of this type of game are predominately male and will search for slightly different things like how to obtain free tokens.