Say Games’ My Perfect Hotel hit #1 Worldwide downloads last week.
My Perfect Hotel represents a game type and genre I know very little about, so it was interesting to take a quick look at what’s driving the game’s success.
Although Say Games has many published titles, their best-performing titles are My Perfect Hotel (by developer Redux Games) and Dreamdale (by developer HN).
Both games use the same gameplay model: casual action builder progression through resource collection and building/city upgrading.
Check out our write-up below for more details on this high-performing gameplay model.
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🔦 Spotlight | My Perfect Hotel finds success in a casual builder genre with strong ad monetization
Say Games seems to have found a recipe for success in its My Perfect Hotel game and its other hit, Dreamdale. Both games follow the same gameplay model of an avatar that performs maintenance and collection tasks to upgrade building progression.
The avatar performs collection and maintenance tasks to collect or enable the collection of resources. The avatar can then spend resources to upgrade various types of building progression. For example, in My Perfect Hotel, the player can use resources to upgrade hotel rooms or expand the hotel’s size. Further, agents can be purchased to automate tasks such as replenishing bathroom toilet paper, parking cars in the garage, or checking in hotel guests.
The real innovation in this type of game has been the easy and accessible way players can feel the game progress and upgrade progression. Collecting and upgrading feels super smooth and easy.
Secondly, the game has been designed with ad monetization as part of the core progression pathway in the game. You can collect and upgrade without watching ads, but you strongly feel the lack of progress without engaging in ads. Both My Perfect Hotel and, perhaps, Dreamdale, even more so, integrate ad viewing into gameplay very aggressively.
In years past, ad-focused games that could drive $0.10 in ad ARPDAU were considered strong performers. I would venture to say engaged players for this kind of game could easily top $0.10 in Ad ARPDAU.
From a downloads and revenue perspective, My Perfect Hotel seems to be Say Games’ top-performing title.
You can see below My Perfect Hotel, in particular, started to take off last month, around August 14.Â
When looking at revenue, despite low relative downloads, Dreamdale seems to be outperforming for revenue. This should indicate that this type of gameplay model can monetize very well compared to other kinds of casual games.
Note, however, that some of these games can derive over 90% of their revenue from ads, which is not reflected in the chart above. Hence, you can expect these games to be making dramatically more revenue through ads than are reported by IAP revenue.
Given the recent and dramatic success of My Perfect Hotel, I would expect to see more iterations of this basic model for success. Clearly, this model is working, and other unique and compelling themes could take this model to even greater success for publishers like Say Games and others.
