Console and PC gaming are hardly niche interests, but it could also be argued that these p💜latforms specifically comprise just a chunk, rather than the majority, of video games played around the world. This is because casual games, generally for mobile devices, comprise a giant market that exists oftentimes outside of regular video game discourse. This makes "casual" gaming easy to overlook, but the massive numbers behind it make the medium impossible to ignore.
A new report shared by compile𒁃d by software company, Unity, and mobile marketing company, Adjust, tracks just how massive the casual game market was before widespread quarantine conditions occurred worldwide, as well as just how massively it grew since,🍌 once everyone found themselves stuck at home.
Pre-pandemic, "hypercasual" games, which the report defines as mechanically simple games designed for minutes-long play sessions, accounted for 78% of new games downloaded in 2019; a statistic as representatiꦇve 💫of industry dominance as could be. Following the quarantine orders issued worldwide, all of which more-or-less were implemented in or around March 2020, total installs of hypercasual games increased by 103%.
This indicates that, issues with casual gaming aside—things like converting a free app downloaded while bored into something used regularly, or the widely-perceived lack of critical interest in casual games, especially when compared to the wide range of games not considered casual—the medium isn't going anywhere. With numbers so big, the industry will do what it can to adapt to this dynamic rather than per🦄ceiving them obstaඣcles of any sort of significance.
Ideally, any growth in the popularity of video games, genre or platform aside, should only be good for the video game industry. Even if all of the variations of hyper-casual don't ultimately transition from Candy Crush to preordering a PS5 console, for example, some still will, even if that number may be low. That casual games are thriving is now an undisputed fact, barring some wildly inventive interpretation of such staggering numbers. How that impacts gaming overall is up to the companies making these entry-level titles, some of whom hopefully will and doubtlessly do see 🥀value in a well-crafted experience beyond the revenue it brings in.