Mobile Game genres are dead. Long live the new genres!

What the talk is about

Kalle Heikkinen of Game Refinery explains why the industry needs a new way to classify mobile games and how his company built one. App Store genres are vague and overlap, so they show the real market structure poorly. The team set three requirements for a taxonomy: coverage, flexibility and a useful level of detail. The result has three layers: four categories (casual, mid-core, casino, sports and driving), genres within them, and 52 sub-genres. The speaker demonstrates it on RPGs, comparing market shares in the US, Japan and China, the sub-genre mix and year-on-year shifts. Turn-based RPGs lead in the US and Japan, while MMORPGs lead in China. From there one can dig into top games and their features. In the Q&A he discusses why RPGs are so popular in East Asia. Useful for product managers, game designers, analysts and market researchers.