Top 10 Game Development Ideas for 2023

Game development is one of the most lucrative yet expensive businesses to start, especially if you are targeting players from a first-world nation like the USA. Success depends on multiple factors like the uniqueness and diversity of your game content, the right execution of game development, and on-point marketing.

However, in 2023, launching a game startup has become as simple as hiring a game app development company, monitoring and testing the technical and experiential sides, then marketing, evaluating, and earning.

If you, too, want to take a plunge into such a financially rewarding business venture, here are the top 10 ideas to help you make your first move.

1. Play to earn games

As the name suggests, play-to-earn games reward players via monetary and non-monetary benefits like cash, discount vouchers, freebies, sample products, NFTs, and even cryptocurrencies.

Globally, professional players place high stakes and invest in such games to win rewards. Cashback and NFT games are such examples.

Now launching a play-to-earn game is a lucrative business venture, but it comes with high investment. If you are sold on this idea though, there are ways to optimize the game development costs.

The first is to launch an MVP of this game. Build a minimal version first, attract players, start monetizing, stabilize your cashflows then keep scaling.

The second is to hire a team of mobile app development in Chicago. That’s because Chicago’s app developers are competitive and highly talented. And you can easily find a team under your budget.

2. Arcade games

The arcade game genre is endless – you keep running, smashing, merging or whatever the game asks you to do. Travel Town, Subway Surfers, and Temple Run are famous examples of profitable arcade games.

These games have huge target audiences, and greater chances of success with unique game content, but low profit per download because you have to really work smarter to maintain download rates.

While player retention is a thing with arcade games, with steady progress, captivating challenges, and interesting rewards, you can kick off well within 1 year.

3. Educational games

With a very specific target audience, these games are for students – of maths, English, medical, and as specific as you can get. Anatomy, MinecraftEdu, and Prodigy Math are popular educational games.

4. Professional games

Professional games can be launched in either of two domains – create a game for a specific career like nurses, teachers, or engineers, or target overall executive skills like teamwork, public speaking, planning, budgeting, memorizing and recalling, and meeting deadlines.

Charades, Murder Mystery, and Scavenger Hunt are professional games getting popular in executive skills.

Project Hospital, Minecraft, and Overwatch are popular games for specific professionals.

5. Healthcare games

Now that’s one of the most comprehensive game niches. You can choose to launch a healthcare game in the physical or emotional well-being categories.

Games in the physical health sub-niche can have challenges and rewards for completing healthy tasks like drinking water, working out, walking in the park or swimming. To further diversify the game content, you can choose disease management categories for symptoms of diabetes, cancer, and blood pressure.

In the emotional well-being domain, you can go as basic as an adult coloring book with mandalas, or relaxing tasks like filling a bookshelf, or as specific as managing panic attacks, stress and anxiety.

Some healthcare games also reward players for giving up negative habits like vaping and smoking. Stop Vaping is one such venture by a university that tracks the habit of vaping and then rewards players as they complete milestones.

6. Real-time strategy games

RTS games include chess, ludo, carrom, and so on. These games are mainstream and have a huge target audience, but so are saturated, and you really need to do something different to stand out amongst competitors. However, you can hit the market big with puzzle games that offer unique gameplay and has fresh rules that are challenging and interesting.

7. Sports games

Another popular gaming niche, sports, can include baseball, soccer, cricket, bowling, swimming, and so on.

The rewards are simple, and most sports games usually follow real-life sports rules. Though game builders can make these games more interesting by tweaking the actual game rules and allowing real-life player characters.

8. Role-playing games

Games like Choices and Episode are getting popular because they give players a chance to create their own stories and develop characters as the plot progresses. Such games usually have at least 3 to 4 characters and different life situations and are built on complete stories.

While some of them can have drama and romance as story characteristics, others are based on genres like comedy, revenge, and resilience.

9. Racing games

Racing games are popular amongst target audiences of almost every age. From 3 years to 63 years, people want to play races of some sort. These can include bikes, cars, and other vehicles, as well as animals like horses.

Zed Run is an NFT-based, blockchain game that also falls under the category of racing games. With simple yet captivating gameplay, it is getting as popular as it can get while welcoming heavy financial stakes from professional players and traders.

10. AR and VR games

AR and VR games use these modern technologies to enhance the player experience 360 degrees. Now, these technologies can be integrated with almost every game genre, but these are super popular with healthcare and horror games. Look at examples of Pokémon Go, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Zombies, Run!

These use tech stacks like real-time GPS location and engage the players while being in their real environments.

AR games don’t usually need extra hardware, but they use development frameworks like ARCore. VR games typically need hardware like VR gadgets and Oculus to help players experience the artificial environment.

Final Thoughts

The above write-up concludes the top 10 game app development ideas. So, if you’re a business owner or an aspiring entrepreneur who runs out of ideas for your upcoming gaming project, this write-up is all that you need.

Choose the niche that best fulfills your brand’s needs and demands.

We hope you may find our article useful and informative.