The team did a great job of working through these, but it took a huge amount of time and emotional effort to be continually rebuilding large sections of the game. Exactly because the gameplay was novel, we needed novel solutions to these problems – we could get inspiration from other games, but no one had solved these exact problems before. But the more we worked on the details the more problems we threw up. We had a good prototype and the gameplay was novel and fun. Games are complicated systems, especially action strategy games designed to give years of play. But in hindsight this approach seems just as misguided as cloning games, as I had failed to recognize the current state of the market and the value of building on existing company expertise, tools and audiences. I felt that given the talent at Wooga, our understanding of game design and the amount of user testing we used in the creative process we could make a success in any genre. I loved the genre myself, and felt there must be an audience who were likewise unsatisfied by the current offerings on the App Store. Whilst Wooga has a history of casual, single player games, I set out to make an action strategy game. This was my approach on my last game too. It’s also creatively unsatisfying and for a combination of these reasons many people advocate the opposite end of the spectrum: radical innovation in the hope of striking it lucky. It is for this reason that we do not clone games at Wooga, and never have. Replicates of Candy Crush Saga have performed similarly poorly. Looking at the charts it is clear that cloning games does not lead to success – the only game with similar mechanics to Clash of Clans is Boom Beach, also by Supercell. So where does this leave us? How to we compete in a market that has become this tough? It’s a question that we ask ourselves a lot at Wooga, and even with our current successes (Diamond Dash, Pearl’s Peril and Jelly Splash) something that we are still working out. Even the UI transitions in Hearthstone demonstrate a level of polish that few established studios, let along Indies could hope to pull off. Smaller developers can pull off great looking games such as Monument Valley or Badlands, but only when they choose very stylized appearances that facilitate lower costs of production. Super Evil Megacorp spent two and a half years developing Vainglory, and it showed – the graphics looked closer to AAA standard than what we would normally expect from a mobile game. SuperData also reports that CPI now stands at an average of $2.78 for mobile games, whilst average revenue per user is just $1.96 – not a good ratio for developers. Machine Zone’s recent $40m advertising campaign for Game of War illustrated just how much money the top companies can throw at marketing. SuperData estimated that the cost of acquiring a user increased 37% between Jan 2013 and Jan 2014. Games that do manage to break into the upper reaches of the charts are notable because they are so rare now, and often supported by very strong brands, such as Kim Kardashian. Many of the other games in top 10 are similarly long lived, and just two developers: Supercell and King consistently account for at least half of the top 10. These games appear to have locked down their respective genres in the way that Call of Duty or World of Warcraft has on other platforms. Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans have been in the top 3 games for over 2 years now. The top grossing charts are largely static. Beyond the sheer quantity of games available, there are three clear indicators of this development. This is typical of all markets as they mature, but it is striking just how fast this has happened in mobile, and developers of all sizes are finding the competition fierce. The barriers to entry remain low – you can code and release a simple game on your own – but the barriers to success continue to get higher. Games dominate this marketplace, with more than twice the number of apps as the next biggest category, and well over 10,000 new ones being added each month. Now there are 800 apps downloaded every second – 2 billion a month – and the number of apps available has grown more than 1,000 fold to 850,000. It’s hard to believe that the App Store is only six and a half years old – it was launched in July 2008 with just 800 apps.
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