It is crucial to know what makes competitors' games different.
This can have a big impact on players:
Demographics and motivational drivers
Retention
Monetization
Just to name a few!
Thus keeping an eye on the competitors and comparing your own game to theirs is crucial.
These little differences can make the game experience as different as night and day to your own game!
You can identify what your competitors are doing differently in two easy ways:
Using Market Explorer
Using Compare Games
In the GameRefinery platform, you can compare your live game as well as prototypes to the competitors! We'll talk more about prototypes later in this guide.
Compare published games through the Game Overview page
Search for your own game's Competitors tab. We'll be using the Clash of Clans example here!
Clash of Clans' Competitors tab - Note the Orange "Show in Market Explorer" button
Click the orange Show in the Market Explorer button. This creates immediately two segments in Market Explorer:
Blue – Your own game
Orange – The competitors
On the Features Data tab, you can easily compare and see what features exist in your own game and in competitors' games and vice versa!
The percentage of each feature per color tells if the game(s) has implemented that feature. If blue has 0%, the feature is not implemented. If orange has x%, it means that a certain percentage of competitors have that feature! You can always click the percentage to see which games specifically have it implemented.
We can immediately identify that Clash of Clans does not have Gacha Mechanic in daily reward, but 45% of its competitors do!
Clash of Clans vs. its closest competitors' feature breakdown in Market Explorer (as two separate segments)
Finding which Clash of Clans' competitors have gacha mechanics in daily rewards implemented
Compare games using Compare Games tool
If you want to be more precise in identifying feature-level differences, Compare Games is the place to go!
Take the selected games from the Competitors tab or Market Explorer and add those in Compare Games.
Click Add game
Use our genre taxonomy to filter
Or search by name
Click green SELECT to add the game to the comparison.
Clash of Clans side-by-side with its closest competitors in Compare Games
There are two options to compare games:
Show differences
Show similarities
We can now utilize the +260 features to start dissecting the games to find how they've implemented features.
GameRefinery best practice tip #2
Feature sets in top-grossing games are hardly static as developers constantly try to add new mechanics to improve monetization and retention. If you would like to stay on top of your competitors' feature development strategy, please follow these steps:
Follow the game from its Game Overview page - This way, you will always receive notifications when new content has been added to the game
Subscribe to Daily Digest emails and change the email preferences to receive messages related to updates, releases or other news.
Install a free Slack bot to receive instant notifications of competitors' updates