CasualCharts: Will sims replace click management games?

Apr 21st 2008 at 14:23 by James C. Smith

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At CasualCharts.com we track the most popular casual game portals and archive their top 10 lists for downloadable casual games. Our World Map chart shows which downloadable casual games are currently popular on 25 different web sites all in a single page and makes it easy to highlight a single game across many portals or all the instances of a popular game type like Hidden Object games.

This can provide a summary of the current state of the casual universe or a summary of any historic date range. Our archived data for a few portals includes six years of data and we have two years of data for the other portals. CasualCharts.com has many different ways to view this data. You can focus on a single game and see how it performed on every portal it was released on. Or you can use the History chart to focus on a single portal and see their “top 10” list over time and visualize the individual games rising and falling on the list.

Every game is tagged with a “core play mechanic” so that you can find all the instances of Hidden Object games like MCF Ravenhearst, Click Management games like Diner Dash, or Chain Popper games like Zuma. You can also use the tags on the World Map to see that all Hidden Object games combined are currently outperforming all Click Management games combined and then scroll back to 2006 when those roles were reversed. In additional to archiving the top 10 lists we also archive the new releases on each portal. Many of the new releases never make it into the top 10 but we still archive their release dates and core mechanic.

The New Releases chart can show all the new releases for all the portals for one week, or it can be used to examine a single portal over many months in a calendar view. It makes it easy to do things like highlight and count all the Hidden Object games released on Big Fish in the past six months.

In this column I will point out the trends I see each week as I examine the CasualCharts.com data in every way imaginable.

The best-sellers during April 13th to April 19th

This week’s most popular game is Dream Chronicles 2. This adventure game is currently ranked number one on Real Arcade and Reflexive and in the top ten in Big Fish and Yahoo. It is refreshing to see that the number one game doesn’t have to be a Hidden object or Click Management game.

A close second is Big City Adventure: Sydney Australia, a Hidden Object ranked one on MSN and in the top ten on AOL, Pogo and Real. Bejeweled 2, a three and half year old Match 3 managed to be this week’s third overall game by being number on Yahoo and ranking on the top ten on AOL, MSN and Reflexive. Rounding out the top five we have the Sim game Westward II and the Click Management game Jane's Hotel Family Hero. It is worth noting that every single game in this week’s top five is a sequel. The conventional wisdom is that sequels usually don’t perform as well as the original they follow, but a sequel to a very successful game has a much better chance of doing well than the average new and unproven game. It is very typical for the top ten lists on most portals to have five or more sequels in them on any given day.

Most popular gameplay mechanics

The most popular core play mechanic this week was Hidden Object games fallowed closely by Sim games and Click Management games.

If you combined Sim and Click Management together they would overtake Hidden Object. (more on this in a moment). Hidden Object games have been available as downloadable casual games for some time. I Spy Spooky Mansion was release on Real Arcade on March 9th, 2005 but the Hidden Object mechanic started to really get popular when Mystery Case Files: Huntsville was released near the end of 2005. It wasn’t until late September 2006 that Hidden Object games became the most popular play machine when MCF Huntsville was joined by MCF Prime Suspects and Hidden Expedition: Titanic. These three games combined allowed the Hidden Object machine to overpower the Click Management mechanic, which had been the reigning champ for some time. For the year and a half since then Hidden Object games have dominated the top ten lists more so than any other play mechanic sometimes ranking higher than the next three mechanics combine.

Nevertheless, Click Management games have remained strong and have started to evolve to the point where the lines are really blurred. Games like Build-a-lot, Alice Greenfingers, Farm Frenzy, and Plant Tycoon combine many element of the typical Sim games together with elements of Click Management games. They are classified on CasualCharts.com as have a Sim mechanic due to the way they structure their economy allowing for things like managing resources, seeing your own prices on goods and using money to buy and upgrade items during a level as apposed to the typical between level upgrading you see in Click Management games.

Unlike the classic Sim games, this new generation of game is much more action oriented. They have relatively few numbers to manage compared to classic Sims and focus a lot on clicking action and time management. Many casual players who are used to Click Management games are very receptive to games like Build-a-lot and Alice Greenfingers and probably think of them as improvements on Diner Dash rather than comparing them to Lemonade Tycoon. This is why it is relevant to point out that Click Management and Sim combined greatly outrank the Hidden Object games on most of the portal’s top 10 lists for downloadable casual games.