Coincidentally I happen to have a puzzle game myself that brings quite an enjoying challenge to those who play it. Unfortunately it doesn’t reach many, considering it’s not featured or displayed under its respective genre. There’s probably been many posts about bring game genre filters back, but this is about the genre pages specifically.
Each genre currently displays only a mere selection of these experiences (I remember the amount being extremely limited years ago too), which are most likely the same limited games that have already established players + players have most likely played before if they’re interested in the respective genre.
The other ‘90%’ are hidden. With the charts page being called ‘discover’ before, it’d be great to allow users to further discover places of each genre, whilst lesser known games have a chance of being discovered too.
Take this concept for example, where the genre is being displayed at the top, along with a banner, an indicative icon, avatar or anything else related to the genre.
The first two rows or so could be a spotlight with the ‘top popular picks’ of this week or hot newcomers.
Below these, under the ‘discover also’ selection is a much larger selection of experiences that fall under this genre, which seeks to include all kinds of puzzle games for the user to explore.
To further aid their discovery, there’s useful filter categorisation tools put in place for the user to further customise this page.
These categories probably differ depending on the genre, but ones for ‘Puzzle’ may be:
[ Solo / Multiplayer ] - Ability to be played with friends or by yourself
[ Easy / Hard ] - Level or range of difficulty
[ Paid / Free ] - (mostly for parents)
[ All ages / 6 - 12 / 13 and up ] - (for parents, level of difficulty, artstyle and language)
[ Escape Room / Maze / Classic Jigsaw / Thinking Spots (chess or so) / Memory ] - Subgenres & tags that best describe the genre.
Besides making it easier for the user to find what they’re looking for, tags would also allow developers to label what best describes or categorises their creation.
(from mobile app Clash of Clans)
It’d be especially great if experiences below the spotlight rotated regularly, either arbitrarily or based on the user’s filters (‘new in’ / ‘latest’ for example).
This keeps the page looking fresh every time and allows the user to always find new gems to play.
As for developers, this shines some light on their experience. There could even be some algorithms in place that will further boost a ‘discover also’ game up the chart of have it appear more regularly until later it may even reach the ‘spotlight’ section of that week.
Further genre specification especially will greatly ^^