Female Gamers Are Boosting Interactive Story Games during COVID-19

[Admin]

With the popularity of mobile games, female gamers have become key users that can influence the top position in the grossing rank. Recent reports show that the global outbreak of COVID-19 has turned more female users into mobile gamers: female gamers in China’s mobile games market increased significantly at the end of January, and female game downloads in Europe and America just soared in March after lockdowns were imposed.

Chapters: Interactive Stories has almost squeezed into the top 20 of the US bestseller charts, according to the data of the advertising intelligence tool SocialPeta. Comparing its ad creative quantity over the past 6 months, we found the advertiser started placing more ads at the end of February, showing its ambitious action to grab market share.

• Female Gamers Help Increase Interactive Story Game Downloads

Chapters: Interactive Stories was released at the end of 2017. It is based on 100+ visual novels of romance, fantasy, sci-fi, young adult, comedy, and drama series. Gamers can choose different independent stories and advance the plot with dialogue options (including paid options).

Chapters: Interactive Stories is an interactive story game, with women as the core gamers, given the nature of the game. The recent recovery in its market performance is undoubtedly credited to female gamers, but it also indicates great demand for such games in the market. In interactive story games, the story is developed in the form of dialogue, allowing gamers to make their own choices at some nodes, and different choices will lead to different outcomes. As in the slogan of Choices: Stories You Play, “One choice can change everything!” So many female users are attracted to interactive story games not only because of the rich game content, but also because the information they convey applies in real life.

• The Interactive Story Games Prefer Video Creative

Market-sensitive advertisers have spotted in this special period the golden opportunities in the mobile games market. Top interactive story games in the current market are Pocket Gem’s Episode-Choose Your Story, Pixelberry’s Choices: Stories You Play, and Crazy Maple Studio’s Chapters: Interactive Stories. Reviewing their ad creative over the past 3 months, we found interactive story games were more inclined to release video ads, as exemplified by Choices: Stories You Play and Chapters: Interactive Stories, in order to show users more of their gameplay and fun. What is also noteworthy is the proportion of playable ads in the ad creative of these three games. Playable ads let users try before installing.

The ad creative content of interactive story games is largely reflected in the gameplay. In a diversity of daily life scenes, relationships are placed at the center of the story, and the plot is advanced with dialogue options. Compared with the game, however, the ad seems to be more dramatic, with some hot plot (which may "play edge ball") to attract users. The hot plot is a means of attracting target users to download the game, but advertisers must soberly and strictly abide by the advertising guidelines of all channels, otherwise the ad may easily be banned by the platform.

Apart from interactive story games, makeup games have also performed very well in the recent past, according to SocialPeta data. The growth of female gamers makes more and more game developers and operators aware of the potential of female games. Female users and male users focus on different aspects of games. Game developers and advertisers need to pay attention to female users’ needs and habits to seize market opportunities so that we can expect more Female games of high quality in the future.