The Multiplayer category is the only ‘special’ kind of category we have this year, in the sense that it’s not tied to any particular genre. All a __game needs is a multiplayer component, whether that is online or local.
Battlefleet Gothic: Leviathan – the mobile adaptation of Games Workshop’s classic table-top __game – is this year’s winner. Unlike its cousin on the PC (Armada), Leviathan is turn-based and a more faithful replication of the original experience, making it a perfect mobile-multiplayer title.
We asked Matt back to speak some more words on Leviathan and what makes it such a good experience:
You can't ask more from a tabletop adaptation than strong single-player, smooth multi-player and a campaign game. Leviathan gave us all that and more: instead of a board, this was a translation of a miniatures game. Distances mattered, fleet loadouts were flexible and graphics were gorgeous. Of course, it helped a lot that the original game was great in its own regard, with a brilliant balance of tactics and randomised thrills. But Leviathan bought it to life on mobile in a way that few such ports of physical games have managed.
A well-deserved win, and we hope we see the game supported more in 2017.
Google Play Store Link
Apple App Store Link
Runner-Up: Legends of Callasia
We were very impressed when Callasia launched itself onto the mobile stage earlier this year. Its expansion, The Stoneborne, did even more to improve an already impressive experience.
Callasia even has a free trial version so that you can try it out for yourself, although Multiplayer is gated behind the paid version. Here’s what Nick had to say about the game:
If you enjoy wartime strategy games but either don't want to or don't have the time to micromanage every unit and territory under your control, Legends of Callasia is a great way to spend an hour or an afternoon. You can get that fix without a huge commitment. By keeping the action focused on generals the game moves quickly and you can play a full campaign in a couple hours.
Google Play Store Link
Apple App Store Link
Congratulations to Grand Cauldron & Boomzap for their awards. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage over the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-up’s during the 2016 Awards, please see the Awards Index Page.
We may try and think of a better name for this category next year, but ‘Tactics’ is the second half of the split Strategy award for 2016. These games focus more on the battles, the tactical game-play that commonly sees you control small numbers of units as opposed to grand armies.
Invisible Inc., from Klei Entertainment, has the honour of winning the first ever Tactics Award. This is a turn-based tactical __game with a focus on stealth – player’s must guide their agents through missions, gain experience in the four skills, and sneak your way to victory over an evil mega-corporation.
Considering this is from the same people who made the excellent Don’t Starve, It’s easy to see why it was a popular one amongst PT staff. Especially given the high praise it got from Nick in his 5-star review:
The pacing of Invisible, Inc. is excellent and once you get the hang of it you can move quickly through turns. The speed-of-play dovetails nicely into the urgency of the overall narrative. In each mission you have a primary objective. It might be to find important information or steal an object of great value. It might be to rescue an important captive or just steal some credits. The objective drives your __game plan, but even once you've secured your primary objective getting out alive is often the most difficult, and most fun, part of a mission. Things can go sideways in a hurry and staying one or two rooms ahead of the pursuit and narrowly escaping a tough spot provides a huge thrill.
A well-deserved win. Our only criticism is that it took so long to come out on mobile!
App Store Link
Runner-Up: Warbits
This was another PT 5-Star rated game. In fact, there were several incredibly high-calibre titles fighting it out for this award, including the recently released SteamWorld Heist, and Slitherine’s mobile adaptation of the Heroes of Normandie boardgame.
Warbits conquered them all however. An homage to the classic Advance Wars series that was prevalent on Nintendo’s hand-held devices, Warbits is very modern strategy game in every sense of the word and boasts one of the best online multiplayer experiences around.
As our phantom reviewer sums up in their review:
Despite the clear influences from Advanced Wars, Risky Labs have stood on the shoulders of giants and created something that is a thoroughly unique game. Where games like Front Wars, Rogue Planet, or Mecho Wars seem more like a reskinning of the Advance Wars experience, Warbits takes that core gameplay and modifies it for mobile gaming while, at the same time, adding their own features to give the game something extra. For example, the split-screen combat results animations from Advance Wars have been scrapped and battle results are shown on the map as they occur. This works to speed your turn up and over the course of multiple online games is a blessing. The Wall and Reactor terrain items add a new twist to the maps. Walls block all units from crossing them and Reactors give Charges and add another map element for players to contest. Finally where Advance Wars had an extensive, and often difficult, campaign game, Warbits has focused on online multiplayer.
An excellent runner-up – we hope the studio comes out with more in 2017.
Apple App Store Link
Congratulations to Risky Labs and Klei Entertainment for their awards. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage over the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-up’s during the 2016 Awards; please see the Awards Index Page.
RPG’s are a very different proposition on mobile than on other platforms – rarely do we get the vast open-worlds of Skyrim, or the action-fuelled spectacles of Mass Effect… although there is promise to be found in projects that sacrifice visuals for substance, like Wyvern.
Still, RPG-mechanics can add a lot of engagement and depth to prevent a __game from being just another run-of-the-mill tactics or action title. There were a lot of great contenders for RPG of the year this year, but Demon’s Rise 2 narrowly beat out the competition to emerge victorious.
Like a well-run __game of D&D 4th Edition (which is a good and a bad thing, to be fair), Demon’s Rise 2 boasted some very satisfying combat mechanics and some really interesting character paths to get invested in. We asked Nick to write some words regarding the game's victory, and here’s what he had to say:
Demon's Rise 2: Lords of Chaos is an RPG perfectly suited for gamers who love a good fight. The game features over thirty hours' worth of carefully crafted combat encounters. These aren't your straight-ahead-until-you're-dead encounters either, no, you'll need to employ smart tactics to succeed. Demon's Rise 2 makes good use of terrain—standing behind large objects makes you harder to hit, for example—and a morale system that can either demoralize a combatant or send them into a frothing berserker rage. You assemble a party of six powerful warriors chosen from fifteen options, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities and go into battle. If you're a fan of smart, tactical combat reminiscent of tabletop-RPG action, this one is for you. Check out my full review of Demon's Rise 2 if you need more convincing. If not, buy it now for your iPad!
Not bad for a game that ‘only’ got 4 stars, but a well-deserved win none-the-less. It’s been a great year for RPG games, and we look forward to seeing what 2017 brings.
Apple App Store
Runner-Up: Banner Saga 2
There was a bit of a scrap for the runner-up prize during the voting, with a lot of games tying for that 2nd Place position. The Banner Saga 2 managed to beat off the competition in the end and is our RPG Runner-Up for this year.
It almost ended in tears, as Tof noted in xis review – technical difficulties and weaknesses in the auto-save feature held this title back at launch, but it’s managed to rally since then. Sans technical issues, Tof had this to say:
I’ll come right out and say that Banner Saga 2 is a better game than its predecessor, and that’s no small thing, considering that the first game shook off its critics stings like so many biting flies, winning nearly all of them over despite their misgivings. It’s not perfect, especially as a mobile experience, but it builds on the previous game’s strengths and benefits from a shift in players' perspectives from what they thought The Banner Saga should be to an appreciation of what it actually is.
Luckily, its managed to rally a bit since release and so is very deserving of the runner-up prize.
Apple App Store Link
Google Play Store Link
Congratulations to Wave Light Games and Stoic for their awards. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage over the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-up’s during the Awards, please see the 2016 Index Page.
It’s been an interesting year for card-games. On the CCG front, Hearthstone is still the behemoth in the room but there are questions as to whether it’s beginning to stagnate. Competitors smell blood in the water and a dirge of rival “me-too” games have risen to try and become King of the CCG-Hill. Whether they succeed is a question for 2017, me thinks.
What has been amazing in 2016 however are other types of card games – games that aren’t built around the CCG formula but have a strong card-based theme, like Guild of Dungeoneering and Lost Portal, or even just strong card-driven mechanics like Twilight Struggle.
Concrete Jungle, by ColePowered Games Ltd., has managed to fend them all off however and claim our Card __game of the Year Award. It’s a fun deck-building __game with a city planning theme, yet it manages to be one of the most fun and rewarding experience you’ll ever have.
The key to Concrete Jungle’s success is its design – very well thought out, with several modes and variations to keep you engaged through multiple playthroughs.
Our reviewer Nick has had nothing but good things to say about it since he submitted his review at the start of October, and he confirmed his unyielding devotion when we asked him to say a few words:
Concrete Jungle is my top pick of all that 2016 had to offer in the world of mobile games. It earned an easy five stars from me for its fun and challenging gameplay, attractive graphics, and amusing voice acting. You play as a brand new city planner in the up-and-coming Caribou City. You have a deck of cards that represent different buildings that can be placed on the game board to earn points. When you earn enough points in a column you clear it and develop deeper into the city. There's a lot of strategy and tactics in Concrete Jungle and several modes of play. The game features eight playable characters, each with different skills and a unique play style, and over 230 different cards to unlock through normal play. I can't recommend this one enough!
I don’t think there’s any more to say after that – a well-deserved victory. Let’s hope the genre can keep up the high calibre of games we’ve seen this year in 2017.
Google Play Store Link
Apple App Store Link
Runner-Up: Pathfinder Adventures
You may be surprised to see Pathfinder not winning the top spot – let me tell you, it was a very close run thing amongst the staff. Some games are just unbelievably solid, quietly dominating their niche without fuss or fan-fare.
Obsidian has been giving the card-game a lot of support this year so it’s gotten even better since Kelsey gave it a five-star rating:
I'm really enjoying Pathfinder Adventures, and I don't expect to stop soon. Not only does the game have a ton of content, but each scenario offers prosaic rewards which are sufficiently satisfying to keep me playing, but allow it to reserve the really special gear for rare occasions… If the bugs are squashed by November, I expect it to figure prominently in our Game of the Year discussions.
A very well deserved nomination and who knows? Maybe this game will crop up somewhere else…
Google Play Store Link
Apple App Store Link
Congratulations to ColePowered Games Ltd. and Obsidian Entertainment. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage of the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-up’s during the 2016 Awards, please see the 2016 Awards Index Page.
Arguably one of the more coveted prizes, Strategy is kind of our jam here at Pocket Tactics. The calibre and amount of games this year has been a bit ridiculous, so much so that we split the ‘Strategy’ category in two – one to cover games that focus more on the ‘big picture’, and then games that focus more on the tactics.
Despite releasing relatively late in the year, Feral Interactive’s iOS port of Rome: Total War has claimed our Strategy top-spot. When it first released on PC 14 years ago, it captured the hearts and minds of gamers everywhere. It’s not aged particularly well as a PC game, but it’s the perfect fodder for an iOS tablet and an evening’s relaxation.
As a fan of the original PC version, I thought I would take it on myself to speak regarding Rome’s victory. It’s certainly well deserved, although it must be said this is a straight-up port – warts and all, Rome: Total War has been adapted expertly to the touchscreen, with only a few interface issues to note. All of the tension, the glory, the victories snatched from the jaws of defeat… it’s all there preserved on a slightly smaller screen.
The expansions – Barbarian Invasion and Alexander – greatly improved the __game as we look forward to seeing those turn up in the near future. You can read more in Nicks review.
App Store Link
Runner-Up: Battle for Polytopia
Or as it was known when we did our review “Super Tribes”. This is a light 4X strategy title that’s been streamlined for mobile, with a brighter art style than you would normally expect. It’s a __game that’s garnered a lot of respect, despite the name change, and it did well amongst the readers too (although it didn’t win there – spoiler alert).
Our thoughts on the game can be summed with from our review, although I’m not sure who wrote it as the CMS seems to have omitted to list an author:
Super Tribes is close to being a perfect mobile title. It takes the essence of a more expansive type of game and creates a 4X au jus which has left me clamouring for more after each game. Midjiwan has said they will be continuing to work on Super Tribes and one can only hope that they will offer a larger--but not too large--version of this game in the future.
A well-deserved runner-up winner. Let’s hope it decides to keep its name this time.
Google Play Store Link
Apple App Store Link
Congratulations to Feral Interactive and Midjiwan for their awards. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage over the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-up’s during the 2016 Awards, please see the Awards Index Page.
This is one of those rare instances when the Runner-Up has a better score than the Winner. Matt may not have scored Crashlands (4) as high as Tof scored Space Grunts (5), but a game’s worthiness goes beyond mere numbers. It’s also about votes, of course, and Crashlands got more. If it helps, we nearly accidentally reviewed this twice, and the other reviewer said they’d have given it 5-stars.
Crashlands charm comes from the fact that it’s not a pure-action game. Straight up Action isn’t something we see much of here anyway, but a __game can have the right blend of genres to give a wonderfully unique experience. Crashlands manages to do just that, mixing survival, crafting and some good ol’ fashioned monster stomping.
It’s a wonderfully nonsensical __game as well – the plot is bonkers, the action given few restraints… jokes, gags so much more and it’s the Quest system that really cemented the game as an experience.
Matt’s been writing words for other GOTY winners, so we invited Sean to speak on Crashlands’ victory, as he is also a fan of the game:
I don’t think it’s really much of a surprise that Crashlands bagged the top spot this year in action. Not only did it excellently blend together the genres of action, RPG and survival together in one brightly coloured bow, it did so with a sense of humour and polish that scarcely graces that mobile market. Crashlands strands you on a strange alien planet with the task of surviving through crafting and battering alien folk. Whilst the game has obvious similarities to Don’t Starve in the survival department it ditches worrisome things like hunger, thirst and permadeath. Instead freedom of both play and movement are highly encouraged. Crafting is surprisingly in depth whilst also being simple and combat is fun and responsive thanks to the intuitive controls. Oh did I also mention transferring saves to and from PC? Crashlands is available on both android and IOS and you can check out Matt’s review of it here.
Very well deserved, and we have high hopes for the studio and the genre in 2017.
Google Play Link
App Store Link
Runner-Up: Space Grunts
Given that this was designed by Pascal Bestebroer- known for creating well-crafted action games that work pretty well on mobile devices – it’s no surprise that Space Grunts did well in the voting. Ironically, the games that Pascal’s studio OrangePixel typically makes aren’t really PT-fare, but then Space Grunt isn’t a game that they typically make.
As anyone who’s played it will know though, this is a rather excellent foray into the unknown, a turn based rogue-like that retains the dynamic shooter feel of past games.
Tof’s review of the game was extensive, having tried it out on no less than 3 different mobile devices, as well as PC & Mac. This paragraph I think sums xirs thoughts best:
Perhaps the highest praise I can heap on Space Grunts is that I expect it to be a permanent fixture on my low-spec Android phone. It’s quick-play friendly (Android autosave quibbles notwithstanding), remarkably deep in its tactics, and Bestebroer writes incredibly efficient code: the Android build is a vanishingly small 14mb and even the 31mb iOS version is going to be one of the smallest apps on your phone, and Space Grunts should be on your phone. It’s lean, tight, and focused in every way possible. Recommended for everybody but dimension-hopping monsters and highly-explosive barrels.
High praise indeed and a well-deserved Runner-Up winner.
Google Play Store Link
Apple App Store Link
Congratulations to Butterscotch Shenanigans and Pascal Bestebroer for their awards. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage over the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-up’s during the 2016 Awards, please see the Awards Index Page.
Tof had so much to say regarding Mini-Metro's win that there's really no point in me saying anything – take it away Tof!
Mini Metro is so clean and minimalistic, you’d expect it to be an abstract puzzler. It’s not, of course, nor is it one of those games that adopt a theme or setting for purely aesthetic purposes. Nor is it a management sim, even though it’s mechanics directly reflect some of the challenges inherent in making a mass transit system run well. Mini Metro defies convention in an understated, unsophisticated way.
Light rail maps are unsung heroes of information design. Their chromatic lines and rounded off approximations of real space untangle a necessarily messy set of tracks, bridges, grades, stations of various sizes, and often enough a mix of above-ground and subterranean travel. Mini Metro owes more to these maps than to the lines they represent. That clarity allows for complexity and a sense of teeming but orderly life in Mini Metro: if your lines aren’t elegant, they probably aren't performing well.
None of that would matter if the interface was cludgy or difficult: Mini Metro starts off relaxing, but picks up speed quickly. That’s the other remarkable thing about it - the wait for the mobile version was long, but it feels like this __game was designed for a touchscreen. Extending a line is as simple as pulling a loose thread, but making changes in the middle of a route is appropriately difficult. Placing and moving rolling stock is easy, but usage grows organically and unpredictably.
Mini Metro succeeds on the integration of it’s strengths, a veritable Grand Central where the lines of concept, design, interface, and polish meet and you have just enough time to get a paper and a coffee before making your transfer.
Just in case you needed more convincing, you can read our review as well.
Google Play Store
Apple App Store
Runner-Up: Imbroglio
Coming in a very close second, Imbroglio is a very different experience to Mini-Metro, but no less deserving.
It's design is second to none, as our mystery reviewer expands in their review:
The last time I was this taken by an iOS __game was Dream Quest back in 2014. There’s no feeling like the one you get when you discover a card synergy or stumble upon a strategy that destroys your old high score, and Imbroglio has been giving me that feeling constantly in the few weeks that I’ve been playing it. Every individual element of Imbroglio’s design coalesces into an elegantly complex whole. Nothing is out of place. It’s the kind of game that I just want to think and talk about all the time, and I’m very excited that others are now able to play and explore this brilliant game. I’ll see you in the Imbroglio discussions on the forums, but for now, I’ve got some more Imbroglio to play.
It's been a good year for Word/Puzzlers, lets see that calibre continue into 2017.
Apple App Store Link
Honourable Mentions:Enyo, Road Not Taken, Deus Ex GO
Congratulations to Dinosaur Polo Club and Michael Brough for their awards. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage over the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-up’s during the 2016 Awards, please see the 2016 Awards Index Page.
Plenty of franchises get lambasted for doing the same thing every year, although one could argue that’s mainly because the developer/publisher are trying to pretend that each iteration is a fresh, new experience when really they're just re-hashing the same formula.
When it comes to something like Football Manager, at least everything is a bit more out in the open. There’s less expectation with regards to how ‘new’ each __game will be, although the pressure is no less to deliver a worthwhile follow-up. Get it wrong, and you’ve wasted a year of development time and potentially hurt the credibility of your franchise, which can have a knock on effect for future iterations.
Football Manager Mobile 2017 had its work cut out for it – its predecessor, FMM16, got a lot of praise for its innovation and design, so capitalising on that for the 2017 edition was going to be no easy feat. It passed with flying colours however, as we mentions in our review. A new challenge mode adds a fresh twist on the core experience, while modest difficulty increases and an improved 'Staff' system made the main gameplay more rewarding.
We asked Mark to come back and offer some words on Football Manager’s Award:
Yes, it is a lot like Football Manager Mobile 2016, but remember that last year's iteration was the best handheld version of Sports Interactive's management sim to date. Seeing as this year's instalment only goes to expand on what has come before, it does not come as much surprise that Football Manager Touch 2017 won management/sim __game of the year. Art imitates life with the introduction of brexit and the headaches that ensue with trying to buy that Under 18 from Belgium, only to have his work visa fall through... It’s kind of making me look forward to seeing that play out in real life.
A well-deserved victory and we look forward to seeing what 2018 will bring to the Football Manager franchise.
Google Play Store
Apple App Store
Runner-Up: The Westport Independent
While discussing our GOTY nominations and awards, Tof and Nick were talking about how if The Westport Independent had been released after Trump won the election, it might have made more of an impact.
As it was, this cynical yet fascinating Newspaper sim released without much fanfare back in February. As Tof wrote in xes review:
The Westport Independent is a contemplative game, and while it's mechanics are enjoyable, they're not evergreen. That's okay, because in the end, The Westport Independent uses it's political-sim and business-sim elements to leverage its story. If you're excited about getting into the role of newspaper editor and seeing what impact you can have, what impact you want to have in a time of unrest and tightening restrictions on expression, you need to play The Westport Independent.
Regardless of timing, this was an interesting game in a similar vein to Papers, Please and very deserving of the runner-up spot.
Google Play Store Link
Apple App Store Link
Congratulations to Sports Interactive and Coffee Stain Studios for their awards. Stay tuned for more GOTY coverage of the coming week.
To keep track of all the winners and runner-ups during the 2016 Awards, please see the 2016 Awards Index Page.
Nintendo has revealed its plans to launch two to three mobile games a year from 2017 onwards.
Company President Tatsumi Kimishima said that mobile could become one of Nintendo's main pillars of business because of its reach to potential new fans and the revenues it generates. It also hopes that its mobile games could boost interest in the Nintendo Switch.
Kimishima also stated that he expects Super Mario Run to surpass 100 million downloads in its lifetime. It has yet to launch on Android, which would open it up to a much larger market for downloads.
Building on success
Nintendo already has plans for at least two more mobile games in 2017 with adaptations of its Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing franchises. The success of these lesser-known titles will likely be used to determine Nintendo's future mobile plans.
The company has already seen its business boosted across the board by its mobile games. Sales of Pokemon merchandise and console games increased following the success of Pokemon GO.
Super Mario Run has already hit 50 million downloads in its first week of launch. Nintendo has yet to reveal how many of those downloads converted to paying players.
After almost two years in soft launch, Dawn of Titans was launched on December 8th.
For UK developer NaturalMotion, acquired by Zynga for $527 million back in 2014, the long-awaited strategy title is "not one of those things that's a make or break game."
However, after having so much time and money poured into its development, Dawn of Titans has inevtiably released with a burden of expectation weighing heavy on its shoulders.
Out of the starting blocks
It's been out for just over a week so far, but how successful was the game's eventual launch?
According to App Annie's data, its early grossing performance has been pretty solid.
Dawn of Titans' top grossing performance, according to App Annie
After steadily rising from position #318 in the US overall iPhone top grossing chart on the day of its launch, Dawn of Titans hit what is currently its peak position of #38 on December 15th.
This equated to a high point of #24 within all games and #8 in the strategy genre.
But while one would expect Dawn of Titans to be a more niche proposition, if we go back to July 30th it's clear to see that NaturalMotion's previous release CSR Racing 2 enjoyed a better launch.
CSR Racing 2's top grossing performance in its first week
The street racing title went straight in at #20 on the top grossing charts, peaking at #18 on July 31st before levelling out in the twenties until the middle of August.
Barring a big boost, it's hard to see Dawn of Titans - which has already sunk to #62 in top grossing - maintaining that consistency. Though Zynga has previously said it hopes to see increased downloads over Christmas as people get new phones and look to try out new games, which could potentially see a boost in its popularity, if backed by a marketing campaign.
CSR Racing 2 remains comfortably in the top 50 (#43) at the time of writing.
Pole position
In this regard, it benefits a great deal from being in a far less competitive genre than Dawn of Titans. To reach #8 grossing among all strategy games on iPhone is an achievement in itself, meaning that Dawn of Titans - temporarily, at least - outperformed some well-established titles.
CSR Racing 2, meanwhile, has been the top grossing racing __game on iPhone consistently since its launch, with no equivalent of Clash of Clans in the racing genre to contest its position.
But the most concerning aspect of all this for NaturalMotion and Zynga will be that Dawn of Titans actually performed better in the downloads department in its first week than CSR Racing 2.
Dawn of Titans hit a high point of #24 in the download charts in its first week, whereas CSR Racing 2 failed to get any higher than #65 in the same period.
This means that CSR Racing 2 made more money than Dawn of Titans with fewer users, suggesting that the latter's revenues are set to drop even further when players inevitably churn.
Titanic revenues?
But let's dig deeper into those revenues. What sort of return have NaturalMotion and Zynga got from their considerable investment so far?
Combining the revenue estimates given by Apptopia across both iOS and Android, it appears that the __game generated around $880,554 between December 8th and 18th.
Predictably, the vast majority - nearly $760,000 - of this came from the App Store. It should be noted however that these revenues are only an indication of how well Dawn of Titans may be performing, as Apptopia does not have official figures.
Dawn of Titans' iOS revenue trajectory, according to Apptopia
The only question is whether this will be enough for Zynga and NaturalMotion, especially as the former remains loss-making despite strong performance in social casino.
Right now, based on App Annie and Apptopia's data, it seems unlikely that Dawn of Titans will reach the same heights as CSR Racing 2.
But in what's sure to be a long life for the game, there are certainly still respectable revenues to be made from a title that's so far competed admirably in mobile gaming's toughest genre.
Glu Mobile has acquired Reykjavik-based QuizUpdeveloper Plain Vanilla in a deal worth $8.7 million.
The Kim Kardashian: Hollywood developer paid $1.2 million in cash and forgave $7.5M in convertible promissory notes. As a result, QuizUp will be re-released on mobile under Glu's name.
Glu CEO Nick Earl will also join Plain Vanilla's board as its ninth member as part of the deal. Earl was appointed CEO in November 2016.
Cashing in
The developer invested $7.5 million in Plain Vanilla back in January 2016 with plans to develop a TV show based on the game.
The deal also included an option for Glu to acquire the company at a pre-agreed price over the first 15 months of the partnership.
"If our partnership proves out and QuizUp revenues scale, Glu will evaluate whether to exercise its call option to acquire the business," said former CEO Niccolo de Masi at the time.
Lasse Seppänen is the CEO & Co-Founder of PlayRaven, a Helsinki-based studio specialized in fresh new strategy games for touch screens.
Lasse has worked in several development and executive roles since 1998 and is best known for his role as Remedy’s Executive Producer for the XBox 360 cult hit Alan Wake.
In a games industry career spanning 20 years so far, Lasse Seppanen reckons he's experienced three distinct waves of mobile gaming.
The first was at the turn of the millennium when he was working on WAP and text message games for very early handsets, pre-dating even the halcyon days of Java.
“Most people don't even remember what WAP means,” he laughs.
Seppanen identifies the second as occurring “around 2003 to 2005”, at which point he was Head of Studio at Sumea.
Here he worked alongside four of Supercell's five co-founders, developing games for early feature phones.
“Ilkka [Paananen] was my boss, who later founded Supercell as the CEO, and the three others were working for me in the studio,” he recalls.
“I know them very well and we share a lot of thinking and DNA. I'm really happy about their success.”
Pastures new
Sumea was subsequently acquired by mobile gaming's then-dominant company Digital Chocolate in 2004, rebranding as the US firm's Helsinki arm.
The following year, Seppanen left the company - and mobile gaming - to work on a secretive new Xbox 360 IP at Max Payne developer Remedy.
I realised that with F2P, strategy was the genre that would be big.
Lasse Seppanen
This turned out to be Alan Wake, a critically-acclaimed psychological thriller on which he was Executive Producer. Seppanen remained at the Espoo-based firm for six years.
The third wave of mobile gaming to which Seppanen refers is the modern era, which offered him the incentive to return to mobile and found PlayRaven in 2013.
“I always wanted to make strategy games,” he explains. “I realised that with the free-to-play model, strategy was really the genre that would be big.
“If you sell one box with one price tag, you don't want people to play it for 10 years.
“That's great for action adventures and shooters, but not great for strategy games. That's one of the reasons strategy never took off in the premium world.”
Unique vision
Some might argue that Seppanen's absence from the mobile games industry was badly timed.
Spending 2005-2013 in console meant that he missed the launch of the App Store and the early hits that came with it, such as Angry Birds and Clash of Clans, returning when the market was arguably already saturated.
Supercell set the formula before PlayRaven was established
But being a new mobile strategy developer in 2013, after Supercell had established an oft-imitated formula with Clash of Clans, gave PlayRaven something to stand in opposition to.
We don't do re-skins, or copies, or clones.
Lasse Seppanen
Seppanen has always been very clear that PlayRaven is only interested in developing “games that bring something fresh and new to the genre and to the platform”.
“We don't do re-skins or copies or clones,” he asserts. And indeed, the studio's three launched games to date - Spymaster, Robocide, and Winterstate - are all very different experiences.
Small teams, big ambition
From a five-person startup in 2013 to 22 employees at the time of writing, PlayRaven has grown steadily but not explosively.
“We haven't gone for hyper-growth,” says Seppanen.
“Think of us like a laboratory. If you're solving a very hard problem - and making a new IP is always a very hard problem - you just need a very limited amount of people who have the passion and experience.”
The core team on Robocide was a mere four people strong. Winterstate's team wasn't much bigger. And yet, PlayRaven still managed to launch the pair within a month of one another to relative success.
Everything in Finland is built with a less is more approach.
Lasse Seppanen
For Seppanen, this is evidence that you don't need a big team to make free-to-play work.
“Clash Royale was made by six or seven people - less than 10, for sure - so I think that's the best example that can be provided,” he enthuses.
Made in Finland
Compared to what he describes as the “brute force approach” of some of the bigger F2P developers, Seppanen goes on to praise the simplicity and elegance of Clash Royale's presentation and feature set.
“You only have the minimum of what you need,” he says.
“That is how Nordic design in general works. It's not just games, it's furniture and buildings - everything here is built with a less is more approach.”
The PlayRaven studio
It's an interesting point, especially given the unique togetherness of the Finnish games industry in which PlayRaven is deeply embedded.
I wouldn't say IGDA created the culture, but it's definitely been there to accelerate it.
Lasse Seppanen
Finland's connection with and dominance in mobile gaming is well-documented and Seppanen attributes it to a perfect storm of Nokia's Finnish roots, the dark winter nights, and the sharing culture that exists between __game developers there.
Seppanen has had a hand in the latter, helping to establish the IGDA in Finland in 2012 and acting as its lead coordinator for the first two years.
“I wouldn't say IGDA created the culture, but it's definitely been there to accelerate and enhance it,” he says.
No contest
Sharing projects early and gathering feedback from peers is a key part of the PlayRaven strategy, with regular meet-ups in the region and plenty of like-minded developers willing to take part.
“There's not much to lose by sharing,” Seppanen states. “We decided, even within the open Finnish culture, to be even more open.”
An IGDA Finland meet
He says the benefit of this approach is “maximum feedback at maximum speed” - a scenario that is much more helpful to PlayRaven than the long and isolating process of keeping its cards close to its chest.
We decided, even within the open Finnish culture, to be even more open.
Lasse Seppanen
This is the norm in Finland, with IGDA gatherings recently hitting a record 700 attendees - most of whom were industry professionals. However, it's not like this everywhere.
“In some places the IGDA chapters have unfortunately become relatively academic, so it's mostly students and the professionals might even avoid the meets,” explains Seppanen.
“That's very regrettable and we have the opposite situation.”
Feedback is key
This “maximum feedback at maximum speed” philosophy can be clearly seen in the firm's approach to soft-launching its latest project - a reimagining of 2014's Spymaster.
The game, which takes the original concept in a different direction, was soft-launched after only five months of development.
Prior to this, PlayRaven has never soft-launched earlier than a year into development. For Seppanen this new approach has been a revelation, leading to useful ideas that wouldn't have arisen otherwise.
We want both the metrics and the opinions of the players.
Lasse Seppanen
“We want both the metrics and the opinions of the players,” he says. “We're actively talking to them and hearing their ideas about the latest update, what went well, what went wrong and so on.”
As for the new Spymaster experience, those who played the original might not recognise it.
There's a new art style, an increased focus on social features and a new card-based design that emphasises the player's empowered position as the tactical force behind these individual agents.
The right team for the job
To a large extent, this is due to the fact that the new Spymaster is being developed by an almost entirely new-look team that features only one individual who was at the company before.
A sustained hiring drive that began in 2015 made it clear that PlayRaven was building a team for a spy game, ensuring that it attracted only those who were equipped and excited to take up the challenge.
And it's resulted in an eclectic and international bunch, including a British lead who relocated to Helsinki from China, a Russian backend programmer, an American client programmer who moved his family from San Francisco, a Canadian designer and only two Finns.
The PlayRaven team
He explains that for the first six months, he had to emphasise to the new international team members that showing their work to other companies is to be encouraged - and not in fact fraternising with the enemy or exposing it too early.
A long way to go
But although this new-look team has been quick to soft launch Spymaster, it has no intentions of rushing it to a full release.
It's currently toying with ideas internally, moving away from the traditional structure and presentation of mobile strategy games that we've come to expect.
One of these ideas is to move the emphasis away from the game's map and into the guild chat, making logging in feel like something more akin to a messaging app.
“You would see a bunch of missions in the chat stream,” envisions Seppanen.
“Make it a social stream where you can participate in stuff with others, rather than have this very archaic and maybe old-fashioned way of separating single player and multiplayer.”
PlayRaven Marketing Director Robin Squire sums it up pithily: “like Messenger with backstabbing.”
For a company that's consistently defined itself with creativity in arguably the most homogeneous sector in gaming, you certainly wouldn't bet against it pulling this off.
It's often said in the world of free-to-play development that launching a __game is the beginning, not the end.
These aren't boxed products released onto shop shelves, never to be worked on again. These are games-as-a-service that require constant operation and updating, often over a period of several years.
PocketGamer.biz has long been investigating the Making Of notable games soon after their launch, but what happens long after a __game is released?
In an attempt to find out, this regular feature will talk to the developers behind maturing live games about their experience so far. You can read all previous entries here.
In this entry, we speak to Amanda Schofield, Senior Producer on The Sims FreePlay at EA's Melbourne-based Firemonkeys studio.
The Sims Freeplay is the flagship mobile entry in the popular life simulation series, and recently celebrated its fifth birthday.
PocketGamer.biz:With The Sims FreePlay five years old, how do you reflect on its performance - from launch to the mature title it is now?
Amanda Schofield: When I reflect on The Sims FreePlay, it still amazes me how much the game has grown.
We started out with a game where you could control 16 Sims, have a pet dog and a career and that was most of the game.
We never thought that hundreds of millions of people would have played and continue to play five years later.
Amanda Schofield
We hadn’t yet introduced getting married, much less having children, and now it’s this rich world which covers every aspect of the Sims’ lives.
Pets range from puppies and kittens to dragons and fairies and the world is full of interesting places for Sims to go, mountains of fashion and near infinite ways to design and decorate homes.
When we started out, we never thought we could achieve so much, and that hundreds of millions of people would have played and continue to play five years later.
How big is the team currently handling live ops on The Sims FreePlay?
It’s hard to be specific, but I think the big challenge with building The Sims FreePlay has been how do you manage a team in perpetual motion?
Lots of games in development will have a timeline and some milestones, then one big push to get the game out and everyone takes a vacation.
In live service, there’s always another update. Taking a vacation means someone has to cover for you.
This was a big change for us, as we had to architect the team around those needs so that everyone can have some downtime.
There’s also the fact that the last update we built is live right now while we’re working on the second one so we need people ready to respond to anything that might come up.
These differences mean the team is a little bigger than an average one-off release game.
How important do you consider customer support and updates to be? What has been your approach to this?
Games aren’t products anymore, they’re services built in a partnership with our players.
Games aren’t products anymore, they’re services built in a partnership with our players.
Amanda Schofield
This means that functions like customer support and community management are a critical part of the game development process and must be embedded with our game teams so we not only know what our players are saying about the newest update, but we also can quickly respond to any problems that arise.
We need to understand when they are struggling with something new we’ve put in or if they’re absolutely loving some one-off thing we tried.
We don’t always get it exactly right, but by having the voices of our players in the rooms when we’re designing and building, we can always learn from our mistakes and get better and better at delivering exactly what our players want to see.
A lot has changed in mobile gaming since 2011. What are the unique challenges you face when it comes to keep the game feeling up-to-date?
The early days of The Sims FreePlay were easy in some ways.
We knew right out of the gate that our players would want babies and once we added them the next logical step was to add in all the age groups so those babies would grow up.
As time went on, our challenges became delivering the content that we never thought we could.
Things like horses, a second story on homes and long hair required us to completely rebuild sections of the game to accommodate systems we never designed for that were clearly very important to our players.
After that, some of our bigger beats have been things like professions to evolve the game and keep it fresh.
Professions have a lot more choice and strategy then most other parts of the game and are paired with a core part of the game that we knew players wanted to see more depth in.
It’s hard to see it as the one game that we launched five years ago - it constantly reinvents itself.
Amanda Schofield
In these ways, it’s hard to see it as the one game that we launched five years ago and bolted some content onto - it feels more like it constantly reinvents itself around the changing desires of our players.
What steps have you taken to ensure that The Sims FreePlay maintains a sizeable and active player base all this time after its launch?
One of the most rewarding parts of working on this game is that our community is very active and always hungry to see more features and content in the game.
We’ve not had to do much more than listen and build to keep the players engaged.
When we find systems that are particularly exciting to our players, we focus our efforts to build that section out a little more.
For instance, a lot of our players are able to build incredible houses in ways we could never have imagined when we created Build Mode.
We’ve been working to give them more tools and freedom to make the houses of their dreams by adding balconies, pools, a second story and all manner of furniture styles over the years.
It's also really key to remember that we don’t have one kind of player. People play the games for lots of different reasons and are at different stages in the game.
Some people love Build Mode, some people really want to tell stories or relive their favourite movies through the game and still others are collectors and want to do everything.
There are so many more ways that each of our players have unique needs and requests when it comes to playing The Sims FreePlay, so it’s super important that we’re always finding ways to reach all of these individuals by varying the content and features we focus on.
Any KPIs you’re willing to share?
I think there are two numbers that really boggle the mind for us.
The first is that we’ve seen well over 200 million installs of The Sims FreePlay to date which shows the extent of the popularity of not just this incredible franchise, but also the game itself.
We’ve seen well over 200 million installs of The Sims FreePlay to date.
Amanda Schofield
The number that I personally find incredibly inspiring is 78,000, which is the amount of game time in years our players have spent in the game!
What lessons have you/are you still learning from The Sims FreePlay? Is there anything about the game that, in hindsight, you'd now handle differently?
We’re constantly in a state of learning and responding here, so it’s difficult to narrow in on one thing, but if I look at the whole five years the game has been running, the main lesson for me is to never think of the game as “done”.
It’s easy to focus on the now and the needs of the game today, but taking the time to evolve the team’s process and tools as well as the game would have saved us a lot of difficult updates in the early years and we would have provided even more for our players in the long-term.
As to the game itself, I’m sure if we polled the team there’d be a laundry list of things they’d love to change, fix, improve - and I have my own.
But I think the years of joy it has brought to millions of players and the continued presence it has across mobile is a testament to the team who builds it, the decisions they make on a daily basis and their constant drive to learn from the players.
Finally, how has your experience with The Sims FreePlay informed where you are/what you're working on now?
In terms of what I’m working on now, I’m still well and truly focused on bringing more exciting experiences to The Sims FreePlay.
If you ask me what I foresee for the future or what I would do next, I think as game developers, there is a change happening in the industry across all platforms which is following the trends of the rest of the entertainment industry.
When players have hundreds of thousands of entertainment options within a touch of their finger, customised and curated for them, we can’t continue to build and ship one-size-fits-all solutions.
Live service games are a promise to our players that we are here to work together to make the game they want to see.
I will never again see a launch date as a finish line; it’s just the starting block of the race. The players tell you when you reach the finish line.
This article was originally published on August 29th 2016. In light of the news that DeNA has closed its US subsidiary DeNA Global and ngmoco LLC, we have republished this article to provide an in-depth insight into the problems faced by companies like DeNA.
Five years ago, I was walking over the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne on my way to Gamescom when I received a phone call.
It was someone from Japanese mobile games platform GREE.
They were complaining about a story I had written about the company's recent quarterly financials.
Apparently, I had used an incorrect currency conversion between yen and dollars.
GREE announces its numbers in yen and I'd converted to dollars at the rate of the announcement day, not the rate at the end of the quarter.
My dollar revenue figure was, thus, too large.
'If you don't correct it, the percentage increase in sales you write next quarter won't be correct. It won't be big enough," I was told.
True story.
But that was then
The reason I recall this incident so strongly is nothing better demonstrates the crazy growth of the early 2010s.
The whole mobile games industry was growing double or triple digits, and with +30% margins Japanese platforms such as GREE and arch-rival DeNA (pronounced D-N-A) were some of the most profitable games companies in the world.
Apparently, they didn't care whether you got their revenue numbers correct, or not.
GREE and DeNA were prepared to spend big to get more growth.
But they certainly cared you got their growth numbers right.
And they were prepared to spend big to get more growth.
Between 2010 and 2012, DeNA announced a $400 million deal for US startup Ngmoco, GREE followed up with $100 million, $200 million and $170 million deals for OpenFeint (US), Funzio (US) and Pokelabo (Japan), respectively.
(In keeping with the times, Nexon bought Japanese mobile __game developer Gloops for $490 million in cash, but that's another cautionary tale.)
Fast forward half a decade and the mobile games industry has matured to single digit growth, and GREE and DeNA have long retreated from their plans of global domination.
Recent history is a downward spiral
The only numbers they care about are profits.
The quarter-on-quarter revenue percentages are all negative.
Licking their wounds in Tokyo, they are looking outside of games but within Japan for future growth.
DeNA now breaks down its financials into 'Sports' and 'Excluding Sports' categories.
Both have plans in healthcare and general online commerce, while DeNA is also doubling down on its baseball franchise, the perennially sixth-placed Yokohama DeNA BayStars.
Indeed, despite games being 68% of total revenues, it now breaks down its financials into Sports and Excluding Sports categories.
Heart of the matter
So what's this cautionary tale really about?
Fast-growing companies over-expanding, spending their cashflow imprudently, hiring badly and losing focus?
Yes, but the cautionary tale of GREE and DeNA is more.
It's about what happens when companies believe they are special; that they have cracked the market, when in actuality, they are riding the wave, not understanding how little they understand, and how quickly the market is changing.
At its heart, then, this is a cautionary tale about not understanding the fundamentals: about not understanding mobile games.
As the Chief __game Analyst - Japan at GameRefinery Taija Kanerva is living her dream. Her interest and enthusiasm for digital games and Japanese culture started early in her childhood and later became the focus of her formal education.
Her Master’s thesis (2015) for University of Helsinki compares Japanese and Western games and gaming cultures. She has held positions at Rovio and Ubisoft before joining GameRefinery in 2016.
Torulf Jernström is CEO of Finnish developer Tribeflame.
His blog is Pocket Philosopher.
You can read all his PocketGamer.biz columns here.
Taija Kanerva is Chief Game Analyst, Japan, at GameRefinery.
Actually, this headline is misleading. You definitely should blame marketing, but not quite in the way most of you think.
If you bring something to market, and cannot sell it, then your marketing does not work. But “marketing” is a much broader concept than just the ads and promotion that most people associate with the term.
When talking to indie developers, you will often hear them talking about a “a good game” they did, which they unfortunately failed to market properly. Hence, they made just about no money with their game.
Getting heard
Marketing for indie developers with limited resources and fame is really challenging, no argument there.
The app store has matured quickly, with big developers with big budgets fighting over customer attention. In this environment, it is really hard for a small developer to get their games noticed and played.
However, the bigger problem often lies elsewhere. Usually, it is not fair to simply blame marketing for the failure to get to profitability. It's easy to blame marketing as this is the side of the process the core __game development team often does not understand.
It seems common for indie developer teams to want someone else to do the dirty work of promoting the game. This leaves the developers to concentrate on pure art, without having to think about the dirty parts of selling the product.
Now, let’s go back to marketing basics. The good old Philip Kotler who every marketing novice has had to suffer through in college said that marketing consists of a “Mix” of “4 Ps”. Namely: price, promotion, place and product.
Notice that the product is in there! Marketing is not only about advertising. That is only one ingredient of the soup, even if that is the part most people instantly think about when they hear the word “marketing”.
The four Ps
So, let’s review what the 4Ps mean for marketing mobile games.
Place
This is pretty easy. In the physical world it’s about where you sell your product, such as a specific cafeteria or retail store.
For us in the mobile space, it will all boil down to Apple’s App store and Google Play. At least outside of China (let’s not get started on your 200 other options inside China).
Price
This is also pretty standard. What we’re talking about here is free to download, and four to six IAP price points for hard currency.
Usually, these price points will be from the set of two, five, 10, 20, 50 and 100 dollars. As a starting point, just do it and move on to discuss something more important.
Later on, when your game gets some traction, you likely want to tailor your price points to your players based on market and player behaviour. If you don’t have the framework in-house, Scientific Revenue can help you with this.
Promotion
Promotion is what most people think about as marketing. This is only the advertising part, and it can be challenging.
At times, I’ve seen some consultants at conferences tell developers that they need to reserve money for press releases at launch. This is a part where F2P mobile and premium PC/Console games differ enormously.
For F2P games, early adopters are a really bad fit. They will soon get interested in the Following Big Thing and abandon your game.
For the premium titles, you are building up expectations ahead of the launch. There are gamers (who self-identify as such) who follow promising upcoming games and want to read about them. That’s often not true when it comes to mobile F2P players.
On mobile, there are lots of gamers who do not think of themselves as gamers. Usually, they do not really follow upcoming games with anticipation, or read a lot of news about mobile games.
As a consequence, press releases and game reviews in (game specific) outlets will give you a measly handful of extra downloads for a F2P game.
News outlets will, in general, interest the early adopters searching for the Next Big Thing. These early adopters can be a great market for premium games, as they will pay up front.
For F2P games, early adopters are a really bad fit. By definition, they will soon get interested in the Following Big Thing and abandon your game. Thus, relying on them will lead to bad retention numbers.
Performance marketing is different. If you have a working product where you get the famous LTV > CPI (Lifetime Value is larger than Cost Per Install), you will be able to advertise profitably.
If you do really well, you might also be able to do brand marketing, but honestly, that is quite far away for most indie developers.
All-in-all, promotion can get your game noticed, but without a really great game (product) you will only get a temporary boost.
Yes, you do need to reserve tons of money and effort into promotion - that is essential - but before you do that, make sure you have a product worth promoting.
Product
When doing F2P, it’s clearer than ever that the Product itself is part of the marketing mix. Getting downloads is only the first step of the funnel towards making money. Most of the funnel actually happens inside the game.
The complete path of your customer will look something like this:
What we need to note is that F2P “internalises” the selling of stuff. During the old days game developers could develop the game and leave the selling of the product to the physical retailer and its personnel.
Nowadays instead, your own monetisation mechanics need to work. You need to use all the behavioural data that used to be left to the bricks and mortar stores and their marketing.
A physical store used to run the Christmas sales, now you need to run the whole Christmas event yourselves - inside your game.
You need to create a product for a market, not find a market for the product you already created. The question is how to stand out among 800k games, and what features to implement to target that specific market or segment you’re aiming for.
You need to create a product for a market, not find a market for the product you already created.
For this, you will need competitor data, and feature trends - to know where to differentiate to be noticed, and where to follow others for the things that just work.
It’s not just new games coming to the market constantly, but new ways to make games interesting and able to generate revenue are invented all the time. You will also need to recognise and implement features that fit the synergies of *your* game, and are the best investment for your time and efforts.
Last, you need to use virality to build the user acquisition into the product itself. Again, this a a very clear point where marketing is integrated into the core of the product from the start.
Key Takeaway
So how can you, as a game developer, utilise the product-part of the marketing mix to its full potential?
Ask yourself a couple of key questions: WHY would my players recommend this game to their friends? WHAT makes my product interesting and appealing? HOW can I make the game better and interesting in the long run while keeping players coming back for more?
You will either need to create an internal analysis team able to provide answers to these questions, or you’ll need to figure out where to find these answers externally throughout the whole development cycle and way after global launch.
When equipped with the necessary information, designer skills and knowledge in all the parts of the marketing mix you will multiply your chances of becoming a winner in the contested marketplace - and your marketing team responsible for the promotion will have a product that will basically sell itself.
This was part of the MGU course Mobile Games University: Indie Marketing 101. For more articles in this course click here.
Welcome to PocketGamer.biz's Top 50 developer list for 2015, which is sponsored by mobile advertising platform Supersonic and developer, publisher and tools company Chukong Technologies.
Now in its sixth year, it's becoming harder to recall those days when the iPhone 3GS was the only serious gaming device available.
Clearly, there have been a lot of changes since then; something the list reflects in both obvious and more subtle ways.
For example, our list is now truly global, demonstrating you can find world-beating mobile __game developers everywhere from Helsinki, Tokyo, San Francisco, London, Seoul and Shanghai to less well known cities like Karlsruhe and Aarhus.
We're everywhere
A more subtle change is the maturing of the market.
With mobile __game revenues in 2014 estimated to be $25 billion, it's clear that the early days of high growth are over. Instead, in future, developers will be competing for slices of a relatively fixed pie.
And much of that pie is already claimed by companies with annual sales of more than $1 billion.
That's not to say that new games and new entrants can't shake up the system, however. As demonstrated in Japan and China, radical change is always possible.
Nevertheless, in this year's list, we're focused less on headline financials, and more of the quality of games; something that in future will only become a more important part of exciting the mobile gamer.
And, after all, that should be the starting point for every game.
Over the past four days - and with the top 10 still to follow on Monday - we've been counted down the companies we consider to be the best in the mobile gaming industry.
Of course, all such lists are - to a degree - subjective.
If we had the information, we could generate a top 50 in terms of total downloads, daily active users, or sales and profitability etc. Yet the comparative ease of ranking such information - if it were available - would make such a list lifeless and generic.
Instead, as we consider it, the strength of PocketGamer.biz's annual top 50 is the combination of hard and soft information.
What's next?
Even so, as the big corporations come into mobile games, the top 50 is becoming more centred around financial success.
So while there's always the opportunity for small indies to hit a home run - Imangi Studios being this year's great example (indeed it featured in 2012's 10 to Watch) - our rankings, as the App Store, will become less dynamic
And that's where our 10 To Watch list comes into play.
Not as rigorously compiled as the main list, it's a personal view of companies I've followed in the mobile gaming space - ones I think have the potential to make it big this year.
It's not meant to be exhaustive, companies can only appear on the list for one year, and it's not a comparative rank - merely alphabetic.
It's also worth pointing out there are plenty more companies who could fit into this definition. To that extent, this is a subset of developers, while the point of the top 50 is that it's the set.
Both Pokemon GO and Clash Royale have been recognised as 2016's Best Mobile Games by Facebook.
The social media giant has released its end of year awards across a number of categories and has recognised games across all platforms, particularly ones that make use of Facebook integration.
Overall __game of the Year was awarded to Playrix's Gardenscapes – New Acres. The __game combines town-building and hidden object elements with a match-3 game.
Pokemon GO and Clash Royale were joined by China-only Onmyoji from NetEase. It was also one of the top grossing games worldwide in October 2016.
Pat on the back
Facebook also recognised titles on its own Instant Games platform, with Blackstorm's Everwing, Spil Games' Endless Lake and FRVR's Hex all scooping awards.
Endless Lake itself has also seen 12 million unique players in its first three weeks of launch, with 33 million games played.
"We're immensely proud to have been recognised by Facebook," said Tung Nguyen-Khac, Spil Games' CEO.
"The figures for our game are amazing when you consider this is still a new concept for many players. It's awesome to see Endless Lake performing so well among such famous names."
Creative Assembley's Total War Battles: KINGDOM and King's Shuffle Cats were also given Best Facebook Integration awards alongside Jam City's Genies & Gems.
Netmarble isn’t planning to slow down its M&A activity in the games industry following its big-money deal for Kabam’s Vancouver studio.
Earlier this week the South Korean publisher picked up the developer for an undisclosed fee, though it was previously rumoured to be worth as much as $800 million.
On top of acquiring the studio, Netmarble also snapped up the rights to Marvel Contest of Champions and the upcoming Transformers: Forged to Fight, as well as recruiting Kabam’s customer support teams in Austin and parts of the business development, marketing and user acquisition teams in Kabam’s San Francisco HQ.
It’s the start of a big sell-off for Kabam, which is exploring selling the rest of the company.
Expect more deals
Netmarble is on the opposite trajectory however. Speaking to PocketGamer.biz, Netmarble Games Chief Global Officer Seungwon Lee says to expect more deals in 2017.
“We are active in the space and open to new M&A opportunities in order to become a stronger contender in the global mobile gaming market,” he states.
The company appears to have money to burn. It’s had huge success in Asia with titles like Marvel: Future Fight, Seven Knights and Everybody's Marble.
Last year it invested $130 million into SGN (now named Jam City), while earlier this year the firm was rumoured to have tabled a $4.3 billion bid for social casino operator Playtika.
The publisher was ultimately beaten to the punch by a Chinese consortium, which purchased the firm for $4.4 billion.
We are active in the space and open to new M&A opportunities in order to become a stronger contender in the global mobile gaming market.
Seungwon Lee
But it signals the ambition of Netmarble, which appears close to an initial public offering after seeking approval for such a move in September.
Global push
Given its big global aspirations, it makes sense for Netmarble to acquire Kabam’s Vancouver studio, now simply called Vancouver Studio. It was the US publisher’s biggest money-maker and Marvel Contest of Champions is wildly popular.
Lee says he and the Netmarble team considers Vancouver Studio to be one of the best RPG developers in the Western market, and is excited for its pipeline of upcoming games that includes Transformers: Forged to Fight, set to launch in Q2 2017.
“We expect that this acquisition will give Netmarble and Vancouver Studio a market leading position in delivering more entertaining games to global audience, whose key interest ranges from mid to hardcore RPGs,” says Lee, who adds it also aims to make the games a big success in Asia.
Given the publisher’s expertise and huge success at home, it’s hard to bet against it – although things don’t always turn out well for ambitious Asian companies when it comes to global expansion.
Business as usual
Netmarble hasn’t stretched to a full acquisition of Kabam, but it has effectively taken over the company’s cash cow while taking control of key teams in various locations.
It’s a somewhat complex deal in practice. Lee says the teams it acquired in Austin and San Francisco will continue to support Vancouver Studio’s games, and will not be moving out of their current locations.
“Ensuring stable service and raising service quality persistently is our top priority,” he explains.
Lee paints a picture of business at usual for Vancouver Studio and the teams involved in its success.
There’s no suggestion at this stage that the studio will be working on other IP from Netmarble’s portfolio.
He says Netmarble is focused on maintaining Marvel Contest of Champions as a top grosser, while preparing Transformers: Forged to Fight for similar success.
“We are committed to support the Vancouver studio to continuously strengthen its qualified development capabilities,” says Lee.
During the last couple of years, a certain drag racing franchise has amassed a total of 100 million downloads across iOS and Android.
As the headline to this piece suggests, however, we're not talking about CSR Racing.
Creative Mobile's Drag Racing actuallt pre-dates Boss Alien's iOS smash by over a year, yet – arguably thanks to CSR's eye watering revenue rates – the __game has garnered nowhere near the same amount of press attention.
Why? According to Creative Mobile CEO Vladimir Funtikov, the two games are actually rather different. He says his studio prepared for Drag Racing's fanbase to up and leave when CSR hit the digital shelves, but thankfully that never happened. Drag Racing's players, he argues, are far more loyal, because Creative Mobile's release doesn't "aggressively monetise" its audience and, as a result, holds onto players for longer.
We caught up with Vladimir to find out how Drag Racing has made a name for itself on Android, and where the franchise – and the studio behind it – is headed next.
Pocket Gamer: You've hit 100 million users in less than two years. Is this the kind of target you set for Drag Racing at launch, or has it exceeded expectations?
Vladimir Funtikov: We didn't expect it to become this big.
When we launched Drag Racing we were a tiny team of five people struggling to pay the bills. Our first positive experience came when we stopped trying to sell our games on Android and started monetising with ads instead.
We made a couple simple ad-supported games that did relatively well, making a few thousand euros per month.
Perhaps more importantly, we learned a lot about the market and developed our vision for Android games we wanted to make: short sessions with progress saved in between, intuitive controls, easy to learn and hard to master, free to play and available on every handset, with marketing assets - title, icon, etc. - that communicate the essence of the __game as clearly as possible. Drag Racing was our best implementation of these principles.
Drag Racing
For example, we put lots of effort into the design of on-screen buttons that imitated a real dashboard to make it easier to understand the UI, and we made sure we included some really hardcore features that would keep the players addicted.
We expected the game to do better than anything else we made before, hoping to manage around 10,000 daily downloads on average, but the way it took off exceeded our expectations and forced us to rapidly grow the team and develop the product.
Can you break down the download figures between iOS and Android?
Yeah. Drag Racing is on 81 million since April 2011, or around 90 million if we include the Bike Edition – a themed spin-off launched in April 2012. On iOS, it's at 11 million since October 2011.
These figures represent the number of unique devices our games were installed and launched on, which is the closest we can get to estimate the number of unique players.
We've been more successful on Android mostly because we really bet on it since the early days, getting our hands on every new device, trying to learn the platform inside and out.
Unfortunately we weren't able to dedicate as much attention to other platforms, and couldn't maintain the iOS version of Drag Racing and release timely updates. Our newer games, including the successor to Drag Racing, are designed as cross-platform from day one to avoid this kind of problems in the future.
You've proclaimed Drag Racing the most popular mobile drag racing franchise on mobile. Does this include CSR Racing?
Yes. We've been ranked the number one or two ranked racing game on Android for more than one and a half years, never dropping out of top 50 games in US.
All of these downloads are organic – we do very little marketing and rely mostly on word of mouth to get new players.
We also look at the community around the game to gauge its popularity. Our Facebook pagei has almost 1.4 million fans. A semi-official forum has nearly 80,000 members.
If you type any sports car represented in Drag Racing into Google and add "tuning" - such as Gumpert Apollo tuning - chances are it will return as many Drag Racing-related forum threads as real-life tuning shops or aftermarket part sellers. CSR Racing is extremely good at monetising its audience, but aggressive monetisation and lack of really challenging or hardcore elements have an obvious impact on user loyalty.
CSR Racing launched after Drag Racing, but has amassed much press attention. What do you make of the game, and how do you think it compares to your own?
They made a really sweet looking game, did a good job of getting it noticed, and fully deserve their success.
However, this is not the kind of game I would play, or many of our fans would switch over to. Frankly, we expected them to, and even opened a subforum on our Drag Racing forum dedicated to CSR, but there has been very little interest and only a handful of threads.
If you look at the core gameplay mechanic of Drag Racing, it's not really a racing game – you don't steer the car, you can't do a J-turn or crash your vehicle. What makes it a racing game actually happens in between races, where players spend lots of time matching different types of upgrades and gear ratios to find the perfect combination for a given class and dominate the opposition online.
This is very much how things work in real life competitive racing, where most of the work is done in the garage by engineers and mechanics.
Although based on the same design, CSR Racing simplified both the upgrades and the multiplayer - which wasn't even included until recently - and converted them into monetisation tools.
CSR Racing
Substituting these hardcore elements with good looks and "pay to win" monetisation resulted in a different type of game that targets a different kind of player and achieves different goals - high revenue over a short period of time versus long-term retention in Drag Racing.
If games were cars, Drag Racing would be an affordable track machine that doesn't turn many heads, but rewards those who push it to the limit, and CSR Racing would be an expensive and good looking cruiser that handles like a brick, yet sells very well.
What's next for the franchise, and what's next for Creative Mobile?
Well, the studio has grown to over 70 people - up from 5 in 2010, and between 20 and 25 in 2011 - and remains independent and self-funded.
Last year we released a bike themed spin-off that did extremely well on Android, at some point becoming the second highest grossing app on Google Play in the US.
We did it without any marketing efforts other than cross-promotion in the original game and a couple Facebook posts. After this success, we realised that, in order to develop as a studio, we needed to take on a more ambitious task, and began working on a successor to Drag Racing that is designed to take the series to the next level.
Drag Racing: Bike Edition
The new title is built around the same core mechanics, but introduces much more content, gameplay depth and social features.
The original game gathered a huge following – something we didn't expect and don't see often on mobile – and one of our primary goals for the next game is to give the community a game where they can have even more fun with their cars.
We even went as far as including a dedicated vehicle physics engine that would be overkill for many console and PC racing games, with geeky stuff like real clutch and differential simulation, dynamic tire modeling, and so on, to make sure we have a solid foundation.
Teams and team competitions are another integral part of the new design. The original game didn't do much to encourage formation of teams.
Nevertheless, players created numerous mini-communities offline, sharing tuning recipes and strategies, and even launching informal competitions on Facebook. We want to give the community the right tools inside the game that will make much easier and more fun to join forces with other players.
The visual quality of the game is also a huge leap forward from the original Drag Racing.
Developing a really high-end game for Android is a huge challenge, especially when your user base is on a scale of millions.
We can't just tell these people "Hey guys, we made this awesome looking new game, but you need a $500 tablet to enjoy it". We had to find the right people and technology to make the best-looking game on the market that would still manage reasonable framerates on mainstream smartphones.
After several months in development it's easy to see that we managed to achieve this goal with a game that looks fantastic on the newest iPad and is fully playable on 2010 Galaxy S at the same time.
We are looking to launch the first version of the new game in May or June and continue developing it based on user feedback and metrics. At the same time, we're continuing to support the original Drag Racing game. This includes getting the iOS version fully in sync with the Android build, and launching a Windows Phone 8 port in the coming months.
In addition, we are developing an Android-exclusive spin-off focused on trucks and SUVs, as well as a number of titles not related to the Drag Racing franchise. Thanks to Vladimir for his time.
If you want to know true cold visit a Swedish games studio on the morning when its heating has exhaled one last, rattling death gasp.
As tendrils of ice snaked across the city of Gothenburg, Palringo’s __game development team were huddled indoors wearing enough layers to insulate the Vatnajökull ice cap.
It's not the best time to have come for a studio profile visit.
Chat is hot
Having shored itself up as one of the leading lights in mobile UA, Palringo is a community and gaming platform built around an app that gives players and developers a direct line to chat about games.
While its business is centred on selling rich media messages, premium features and chat apps, 85 percent of the UK-headquartered company’s revenue comes from games.
As such, the Gothenburg office is a sprawling hub of different teams working on an arsenal of projects – from new games, to creating feedback loops between players and developers.
Its employees are delightful. Like a member of its tester team who gazes lovingly at the model Death Star on his desk, beaming as fingers of ice scratch against the window outside. For perspective, he is wearing shorts.
Palringo's __game development is based in Gothenburg and contains the Death Star
Palringo’s CMO Magnus Alm also embraces eccentric fashion, wrapped in his grandfather’s old smoking jacket where (midway through our tour) he exclaims with alacrity “I found a toothpick in the pocket!”
Then, as we walk past one particularly diligent team hunched over their monitors, Alm whispers quietly “they are responsible for watering the plants.”
He gestures to a wizened husk of a plant drooping off the windowsill.
The importance of social
But questionable greenery aside, this is an office that buzzes with activity. Abandon all hope, ye plants that enter here because Palringo’s developers are too busy creating to brush up on their botany skills.
“Integrating social and game is the whole reason I wanted to work here,” one of the game producers tells me.
For us social means that we truly want people to play together.
Magnus Alm
“It creates some completely unusual experiences as you try to get ‘chat people’ who are not into games and ‘game people’ who are not into chat to exist side by side.”
Trying to unite the two is a task easier said than done, but be successful and you unpick a rich new seam of potential users for your game.
In December 2015, Palringo ran an experiment with its casual game Balloony Land. By incentivizing engagement within the Palringo app, Balloony Land reached the top 10 download charts in 9 countries on iOS and 7 on Android.
Plus, the equivalent CPI cost was $0.44 compared to the industry average of $1.70.
“For us social means that we truly want people to play together,” says Alm.
Typing with leather gloves is necessary with a broken heater
“We are soon launching a chat game called Gunpowder, where groups of players will man a ship and fight pvp style against other groups," Alm continues.
"We are innovating on the graphic experience of these type of chat games, and as you can see with Facebook Messenger games, others are following that path as well.”
Creativity within restrictions
Johan Peitz, Palringo’s head of product management, describes his job at the company as “the man with the broom in curling.”
We’re interested in creativity within restrictions.
Johan Peitz
Having once created indie-hit Icy Towers, Peitz provides a guiding force to all facets of Palringo’s operations. Between him and Alm, both have over 20 years experience in the games industry – and there’s one thing they think many companies overlook.
“Many game companies lack business focus,” says Alm. “We meanwhile have a clear focus on business targets – we can’t lose focus. It’s not enough to just create fun games, you have to swing on the pendulum from passion to business.
“We’re interested in creativity within restrictions,” agrees Peitz. “It forces people to think outside the box. The reality is that blank paper can be paralyzing.”
For Alm, it’s summed up by the fact that “Anyone who has ever developed a game know the importance of the term ‘kill your darlings’. It is so easy to embark on a trip down feature creep lane, without even knowing it.
“We believe in creating a fun core and then build your product outwards from that, anyone who has tried the opposite knows that it is costly and time consuming.”
Table tennis provides a focal point for the office
Still, that’s not to say that Palringo does not prize passion.
According to Magnus, “numbers and metrics might tell you that engagement is down, but they don’t tell you that to raise it you need a new enemy.
“You can’t just tweak based on metrics, you need to find that creative flair. Like a rocket fart.”
He points to a raspberry blowing sound effect in Balloony Land as a rapidly deflating balloon cavorts across the screen, gives a satisfied grin, and goes to play table tennis with the rest of the Palringo team.
Because, after all, Palringo never forgets the importance of being social.
