Your games of the year: Monopoly Go, Whiteout Survival and Warcraft Rumble
All of this week's stories in one place, plus thoughts on your games of the year.
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I asked over 40 well-known mobilegamer.biz readers to pick their favourite game of the year earlier this month, and the results were published throughout this week.
It wasn’t a particularly scientific or comprehensive study, but the top pick by a distance was Monopoly Go. And rightly so, it’s an absolute smash.
Scopely seems to have a great deal of goodwill across this business, and 2023 feels like the year it finally landed the mega-hit it has been working towards all this time.
If you’ve worked in mobile for any number of years, you’ve probably either worked at Scopely at some point, or are friends with someone who has, so that helps. And if you’re going to build a breakout hit, it’s another plus that you have a proven success like Coin Master to build upon, a terrific licence and an influx of cash from a new Saudi owner for a beefy UA spend.
Having launched in April and hit $1bn in revenue already, all of that came together beautifully this year to prop up what was an otherwise difficult time for the mobile business overall.
So bravo, Scopely – imagine, at this point, some rousing music swelling in the background as a besuited exec strides onto a stage, picks up a gong, thanks their hard-working team, and departs to a standing ovation.
The next most popular games, according to that same esteemed panel of readers, were Century Games’ Whiteout Survival and Blizzard’s Warcraft Rumble.
The former is frankly not a game that has hit the headlines all that much, but its smart, subtle evolution of some tried-and-trusted idle and 4x strategy mechanics clearly won a lot of you over this year.
The latter got just as many votes, and seems to be the top choice from a pure gameplay perspective. There are plenty of old-school WoW fans in this business, so that helps, but as the folks at Naavik recently pointed out, the game has perhaps not caught fire in the way its developer would have wanted.
But why just the one vote for Honkai: Star Rail? It has had a wildly lucrative launch year, just like Monopoly Go, and is a much richer game experience overall. A quick theory on this: perhaps it’s because Mihoyo’s games are effectively in a league of their own: so vast and expensive to make that no western developer is able to compete in that space, and so don’t give those games that much thought.
Next week: if I manage to pull myself out of a cheese and crackers-induced lethargy, I’ll round up some 2023 highlights for next Friday’s mailout. We’ll see how it goes.
Keep scrolling to find all of this week’s GOTY picks and the last new games digest of the year. And remember i’m always around on email, X, LinkedIn and even Threads.
This week on mobilegamer.biz
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