Understanding factors behind the success & failure of mobile games

Abstract

In an increasingly large gaming industry, mobile gaming share contributes around 51% to global gaming revenues. The mobile gaming market in North America alone is estimated to be over 13 billion dollars. With more than 2.5 million apps currently hosted by Google Play and the wide proliferation of Android devices, Android users currently form the largest market for gaming worldwide. Mobile gaming is a huge engagement & entertainment driver for Android devices and Google Play offers a wide selection of games through its platform across a number of highly popular categories including role-playing, puzzle and first-person shooters. Despite this, there is a general dearth of public research pertaining to factors driving success and failure in the life-cycle of these mobile games. While many challenges, pertaining to volume of data collection and processing, face such research, we believe it is essential to understand these success and failure patterns for use by product/game developers towards refining their future and current gaming apps. For our project, we conduct such analysis pertaining to determining potential success and failure factors among a few sampled gaming apps hosted on Google Play (across game subcategories) using a mix of sentiment analysis and histogram analysis of app reviews. The following report first delves into existing research and literature exploring the life-cycle factors of mobile games and app review analysis to gain actionable insights. Further, challenges and methods pertaining to data collection in the next section followed by detailed methodology (incl. source code used) used to conduct the analysis. Finally, we end with a brief discussion of the results obtained and conclude.