In this post, I will research the market for Tower Defence games. I will explore what is available on the market, the demographics for mobile tower defence games, and what I am aiming for with my tower defence game, METAL MADNESS.
I searched the Tower Defence tag on Steam, filtering by top selling games, this is what it showed me:
2 games on this list of top-sellers stand out to me, Bloons TD 6 and Plants vs Zombies GOTY Edition. They’re both tower-defence games that can be played on PC and Mobile. They feature a drag-and-drop method of placing down towers, making both of them easy to use on PC and mobile platforms. Both are titles aimed at a casual audience.
Reference Games
Throughout this project, I had been playing games that matched up with the themes of my game idea, that mainly being tower-defence and rollercoaster construction-and-simulation games.
One of the games I played was Bloons TD 6, but also it’s predecessor, Bloons TD 5. Gameplay wise, both games are mainly similar. You place down towers, shown in this game as monkeys, who battle travelling balloons (which the game calls Bloons). I found both games fairly easily by researching what types of tower defence games were popular, and the series was mentioned frequently.
On the theme of rollercoaster games, Chris Sawyer’s Rollercoaster Tycoon games come to mind, and I did try out a version of the game published by Atari called Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic on iOS. In this game, you build a theme-park to attract guests and complete scenarios, such has having x amount of guests by y month, and the player builds rides and shops using the budget that they are given, as well as hiring staff members to assist when rides break down.
Another theme-park game I looked at is titled simply Theme Park. Surprisingly I got this from a doctor, I was having a medical check-up when I mentioned what I was studying at university, and particularly what I was working on, and he told me about a game he liked as a kid called Theme Park. I found out that there was a port of the game to the Nintendo DS, so that was the version I took a look at. Theme Park has a similar concept to Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I also had a look at videos on how to market research and this one by Masahiro Sakurai was useful:
He explains that targeting and market research are important, but shouldn’t be taken too seriously, and he says that following the main path of producing similar things to what had been done in the past would lead to more mediocre titles and, and lower sales as a result. That is a fair point.
Admittedly, trying to explain this game to people has been rather difficult. ‘A tower defence game with theme park rides’, has gotten people confused at the idea when explained that way. However, I also think this opens up an opportunity for my game in it’s marketing, as it’s a unique idea that not a lot of people (from what I’ve seen) can envision, I can market the game as this unique twist on the tower defence genre, which will help it to stand out on the market.
I’ve got an idea of what my target audience is for the game. I am targeting casual players for my game, who are playing games on their mobile devices, for example in scenarios like a bus or a train, playing games to pass the time. Searching “tower defence games market research” on Google provides the following, where most of the results mention mobile games vs tower-defence games for desktop or console.
(www.astuteanalytica.com. n.d.) has some key findings related to the mobile tower defence market. Android takes up the majority of the revenue coming from these games with 68%. The largest market for the genre is Asia Pacific. Free-to-play games made up 65.5% of overall market share in 2021 but said that “the pay-to-play segment is expected to register a higher [compound annual growth rate] over the forecast period”, stating that it could be attributed to the greater number of features found in those games, and the study states that the projected figure of 82.1% for free-to-play games and 17% for paid games in 2030 would make it “higher than the average percentage of apps purchased in Google Play.” The study profiled 8 companies that held an almost 60% market share of the genre in 2021, with the study describing it as “slightly oligopolistic.” Overall, it valued the global market for Tower Defence games at $937.6 million dollars in 2021.
As explained in (Rees L 2022) “The genre is especially popular on smartphones and tablets which the report states is partly due to the simple gameplay in combination with the strategic death and high replay value.” This makes the target platform easier to choose, since there is a large audience for tower defence games on mobile devices.
Both Bloons TD 6 and Plants vs Zombies have ports for iOS and Android, but they also have versions for the PC. Bloons TD 6 also supports cross-platform play on mobile and PC versions, excluding the Apple Arcade version (Ninja Kiwi 2022), this is rather interesting, as it suggests that there would be players who would enjoy the game both on desktop and mobile devices, and Ninja Kiwi is giving them an option to sync up their progress to the cloud.
Conclusion
In this blog, I took a look at the market for tower-defence games, and in particular the mobile segment. I looked at 2 popular titles in the genre and the demographics of the mobile market. I also describe what type of player I am looking to target with my game, that being casual players, but I also got advice to not take market research too seriously in the realm of video games.
References
Ninja Kiwi. (2022). Linking Mobile/Steam accounts to BTD6 on Epic Store. [online] Available at: https://support.ninjakiwi.com/hc/en-us/articles/11457625302673-Linking-Mobile-Steam-accounts-to-BTD6-on-Epic-Store [Accessed 8 Jan. 2025].
Rees, L. (2022). Tower Defence games to reach $2.3 billion in revenue by 2030. [online] Pocketgamer.biz. Available at: https://www.pocketgamer.biz/tower-defence-games-to-reach-23-billion-in-revenue-by-2030/.
www.astuteanalytica.com. (n.d.). Mobile Tower Defense Games Market Report | 2030. [online] Available at: https://www.astuteanalytica.com/industry-report/mobile-tower-defense-games-market.