CasualCharts: Click management games are hidden by exclusives

Apr 28th 2008 at 14:55 by James C. Smith

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Summary for the week ending April 26th

This week the overall chart has a three-way tie for the best selling downloadable casual games. Around the World in 80 Days, Westward II and Big City Adventure: Sydney were all neck and neck. Rounding out the top five we have Dream Chronicles 2 and Can You See What I See? tied for fourth place.

Around the World in 80 Days is the number casual downloadable game on both AOL and Shockwave. This match 3 game previously did well on RealAracde.com and a few other portals. Most portals continue to launch one or two match 3 games per week but it is rare for them to top the charts like this. For example, Big Fish launched 18 different match 3 games in the last 90 days but only three of them made any appearance at all in the daily top ten list on Big Fish during that period.

Westward II continues represent Sim games very strongly by being second on Big Fish and ranking in the top four on Real, Reflexive, and Yahoo. Next week you can expect Build-a-lot 2 to join Westward II and push Sim games to the top of the core mechanic rankings. Build-a-Lot 2 has been the number one game on Big Fish for 20 days during their exclusive promotion and it is about to be launched on every major portal next week. The original Build-a-lot was a huge hit and is still in the daily top 10 lists on some portals for 200 days and counting.

The hidden object game Big City Adventure: Sydney is number one on MSN and in the top ten on AOL and Pogo. Another hidden object game, Can You See What I See?, is number two on Real and number nine on Yahoo.

As usual, all hidden object games combined outperformed each of the other core play mechanics by a wide margin. This week hidden object games scored 468 points compared to 361 from Sims and 350 from Click Management games (see below for how we work out sales scores).

Dream Chronicles 2 continues to represent adventure games strongly by ranking second on Reflexive and Shockwave and also holding a top 10 spot on Big Fish and Yahoo. Other popular Adventure games this week include Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel and the original Dream Chronicles.

Click Management games were notably absent from this week’s overall top five when we rank individual game. There are many Click Management games in each portal’s top ten lists, enough to make Click Management the third most popular mechanic this week, but no single game was on enough portals to stand out. Airport Mania has topped Reflexive’s top ten lists since it was launched 11 days ago. You can expect to see it in many top 10 lists as soon as the Reflexive exclusive ends in a week or two. Posh Boutique is number one on Real during their exclusive lock on that game. Burger Shop is doing well on AOL and okay on Yahoo. It was previously in the top three Yahoo, Shockwave, Big Fish, and Real. Other click management games in this weeks top ten lists include Go-Go Gourmet, Turbo Subs, Doggie Dash, and several others.

It is becoming more and more common for portals to get a 20 or 30 day exclusive on a new game. It is not uncommon for a game to launch on Big Fish first and then 21 days later launch simultaneously on ten other portals. Many very popular games never make it to some portals. Real almost never sells any game published by Big Fish including the smash hit Mystery Case Files games. Conversely, Big Fish doesn’t sell any game published by Real Arcade or their subsidiaries including Game House and Zylom. These distribution limitations make it hard to name an overall best selling game across all portals especially for a time window as small as a week. It is much easier to look at groups of games that share a common core play mechanic.

How Scores are Calculated