Heyzap Developers Blog — A New Way to See Android Mobile Gaming Trends

Determining a game’s success on Google Play has always been an opaque process: from the recent shutdown of AppGratis we’ve seen that store rankings can be manipulated and are not always a great heuristic for success. What really matters is how many people are playing your game each day.

To make this possible we are launching Heyzap Trends. The Heyzap app on Android has been downloaded by almost 10 million people to date. Using the data our users send to us about their gaming activity, we can estimate MAU (monthly active users) and DAU (daily active users) data for the entire Android gaming market, something that until now did not exist publicly anywhere.

A bit about privacy: we only use aggregate data across logged in users that opt-in to share their game play data. Data from non-logged in users or from in-game SDKs is not used at all.

The Web has had solutions in place for years: Alexa, Compete and Quantcast all give independent third party data on how many users are going to different websites. The main independent source of mobile data has been App Annie, but on the whole it just takes the ranking data on the App/Play stores and makes it available across geographies and time.

We knew that this was an important problem as we worked with many game developers and saw that ranking in the Play Store was not always indicative of how many actual users they had. In order to really understand the current shape of the mobile gaming market, you need to know the actual usage of the apps.

On Trends, you can now see data on the MAU and DAU by specific games and developers. These are estimates not exact figures, but from talking to many game developers we have found that they are often pretty close to the mark.

Here are the top games on Android according to Trends:

And the top Developers:

Here are some interesting insights we’ve garnered - I am sure you will see more:

Candy Crush Saga, King.com’s hit multi-platform game, has grown from 40m MAU to 90m in just 60 days (according to our estimate). That’s huge:

Temple Run 2, shows a quick rise but is already tailing off at 60m MAU.

Draw Something Free from OMGPOP (owned by Zynga), is actually holding a respectable position, ranked 28 at 17m MAU. This places Draw Something Free as the 3rd most popular game in Zynga’s Android portfolio.

Team Lava/ Storm8, the top game developer according to our engagement stats, has had a string of hits. Though none of its games are in the top 20, Team Lava has 26 games in the top 1000 by MAU and are the leading Game Developer on Android measured by engagement data, even ahead of Rovio, which comes in at number 2.

Remember all of these stats are estimates and I am sure we are wrong for more than one of them. But we have found that they are pretty good estimates and we hope you find them useful.

We are going to be improving Trends over time, please send us feedback on what you would like to see.

Visit Heyzap Trends