App Store Keywords for Games Apps: Measured Demand and Difficulty

The genre match is the cleanest in the whole study. Our phrase-to-category mapping is approximate (only 68.6% of US results matched their phrase's category across all 26), but for Games almost nothing else turned up, which means the phrases below really are competing against other games and not against utilities or entertainment apps.

Cells show estimated volume / estimated difficulty. All phrases were English in all six storefronts, so the DE, JP, FR and BR columns describe English demand there.

Nothing here is cheap. The easiest cell is Japan for "word game" at difficulty 28, and even the easiest phrase on average, "idle game", sits at 41.2. In the US the Games rows had a median of about 202,000 ratings, which is why US difficulty for these phrases runs from 57 to 90.

A short title is not the lever here. Only 29% of top-10 names contained every word of the query, one of the lowest shares in the study, and the share fell to 17% in Japan and 18% in Germany and Brazil. Games that rank for "solitaire" or "idle game" mostly do not spell the phrase out in their name. That fits a market where installs, ratings and brand pull more weight than wording, though this data cannot prove cause.

Practical consequences, held loosely:

• Treat the six head terms as aspirational. For a new game, aim at narrower descriptions of the mechanic or theme and check each one with the same rating-count method before committing keyword bytes.
• Compare storefronts before choosing a launch market. "Word game" is difficulty 84 in the US and 28 in Japan; a smaller market can be where a first ranking is realistic. See ASO for small storefronts.
• Use the secondary slot deliberately. Apple lets a game have up to two Games subcategories, so pick the subcategories that match how players describe the game, and read how to choose a primary and secondary category first.
• Do not repeat words that already live in your category fields. Apple advises against repeating category words in the keyword field; see category names in keywords.

If your game also uses video, music or story hooks, compare the neighbouring Entertainment numbers, and for community features look at Social Networking, where the ceiling is even higher.

For each of 26 categories we picked six generic English phrases and queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in six storefronts, then analysed the top 10 results per query: 936 queries in total, 360 top-10 slots per category. Volume and difficulty are LocalASO's 0-100 estimates computed from rating counts and rank order, so treat them as relative signals. Method and limits are in the research methodology, the wider study is in our research, and the general rules are on how we measure. The raw rows are in the public category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates volume and difficulty for any keyword in 52 App Store storefronts, each in the storefront's local language, using the same rating-count method. It costs $29 one time; the download is free but the app needs a license key to run. Details are on the pricing page.