Arcade Idle HomaJam: A winning theme

HomaJam winners have been announced.
homa games homajam
HomaJam’s winners have been announced.

Homa Games’ Arcade Idle HomaJam has come to an end and many winners were announced.  With the best quality submissions Homa Games has seen so far in an event like this, this jam’s games reached outstanding metrics and presented the most promising ideas under the theme of Arcade Idle. 

Arcade Idle is a new subgenre that combines idle and adventure arcade’s main attributes with a  chilled Hyper-casual look and feel. Removing all complexity from resource mining games, but preserving its core ability to engage, this clever mix translates into hybrid games with medium/low CPI, but much stronger playtime metrics that can reach 30+ minutes. 

HomaJam

With games like Harvest It, Craft Island, and Farm Land, the new category has been in constant development in the course of 2021 by Homa Games. As the novelty raised a lot of interest in the Hyper-casual community, the company understood its potential and decided that Arcade  Idle would be the theme of their next jam in partnership with GameAnalytics

In the course of June, more than 30 developers and studios worked on their best Arcade Idle ideas and were able to test them on Homa Games’ platform HomaLab while using  GameAnalytics’ tools as the main source of analytics. All participants were provided with the HomaBelly SDK, which enables smooth integration with the tools. 

In the Hyper-casual world, complexity overall needs to be removed, even for idle games. From the economy to the controls, all down to the design of the game, simplicity should always be at the core. That’s why participants were provided with webinars and articles with tips from our in-house experts to enhance their prototypes and creatives having in mind the new genre specificities. 

And the winner is… 

There were outstanding submissions opting for the main 250K Grand Prix and the three guaranteed-prize categories that reward best CPI, best RRD1, and best playtime. Dragon Attack,  Ethereal Games, and Unlikely Games were awarded developers who will receive $5000  each for these different categories. Furthermore, there were prizes for Homa’s favorite submission and that of the jammers, as well as the most active and helpful participant in the community.

arcade idle
HomaJam winners.

As for the Grand Prix winner, which hasn’t been announced yet, there could actually be more than one! This HomaJam edition was special because the games on average had the best metrics so far, with lower CPI than the Arcade Idle average and high playtime, as it tends to be the norm for the genre. That’s why a few games had made it to the next stage and could be published soon… stay tuned. 

In this sense, the theme of the competition was key. All the tested games made even more clear the potential of the Arcade Idle subgenre within the Hyper-casual category, as shown by the final numbers. Furthermore, the variety of subjects and interpretations of the theme that was presented among the submissions shows there’s a huge opportunity for game creators to keep developing the genre and use it to unlock creativity.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *