Casual & puzzle
Match-three, word and logic games with broad appeal and long lifespans. Cheap to prototype, brutal to stand out with — success lives in polish and level design.
Six Genres, Six Different Projects
Genre is the first decision that constrains every later one — team size, engine, backend depth and monetisation all follow from it. Here are the six categories our readers commission most, and what each one really asks of a studio.
The six genres we see commissioned
Genre determines everything downstream — budget, team composition, timeline and monetisation model. These are the six categories our readers commission most often.
Hyper-casual
One-mechanic games built for instant fun and ad-driven revenue. Development cycles run in weeks, and studios often ship several prototypes to find a hit.
Arcade & action
Runners, shooters and physics toys where feel is everything. Demands tight input handling and stable 60 fps performance across a wide range of devices.
Strategy & simulation
City builders, tycoons and battle strategy titles with deep economies. The heaviest genre for backend work: multiplayer sync, seasons and anti-cheat.
RPG & adventure
Story-driven worlds with progression systems and long-term retention. Big content pipelines mean bigger teams — art usually outweighs code in the budget.
Educational & serious
Learning apps, training simulators and gamified wellness products. The fastest-growing commission type among the business clients we survey.
Picking a genre you can actually finish
The most common mistake we see is choosing a genre by market size rather than by production capacity. Strategy and RPG titles have the highest lifetime revenue per player, which makes them attractive on a spreadsheet — and they also demand the largest content pipelines, the deepest backends and the longest runway before a single player pays anything. A first-time publisher who picks that fight usually runs out of budget during balancing.
Casual, puzzle and hyper-casual titles invert the equation. Production is fast and cheap, so you can afford to prototype three concepts and keep the one that retains players, but discovery is brutal and the revenue per player is small. The genre rewards volume and iteration speed, not perfection — studios that work this way ship prototypes in weeks and kill them without sentiment.
Educational and branded games sit in a quieter middle ground. They are commissioned rather than speculative, so the revenue question is settled before development starts, and success is measured in completion rates or footfall rather than in-app purchases. If your game exists to serve an existing business, this is almost always the right category — and it is the fastest-growing type of commission among the clients we survey.
