The Year in Mobile Games | Steve Meretzky, Dave Rohrl, Juan Gril
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Delivered at Casual Connect USA 2017. Steve Meretzky, Dave Rohrl, and Juan Gril continue their long-running series recapping the highlights of the year in mobile gaming. They dive into the most interesting new games, updated games, and trends of the year, to paint a picture of where mobile gaming is today, and where it is going.
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The Year in Mobile Games | Steve Meretzky, Dave Rohrl, Juan Gril
- 1. The Year in Mobile Games Casual Connect – Seattle – August 1, 2017 Steve Meretzky – VP of Games, King Dave Rohrl – Owner, Mobile Game Doctor Juan Gril – Executive Producer, Flowplay
- 6. China’s Shopping Spree Shandong Hongda Mining Company Le You Technologies + + Zhejiang Jinke Peroxide Co +
- 8. Midcore Mobile Name Generator Army of Heroes Blaze of Battle Castle Crush Clash of Empire Clash of Queens: Dragons Rise Forge of Empires Heroes Arena Heroes Clash: Castle of Clans Heroes Evolved Heroes of Chaos Heroes of Incredible Tales Heroes of 3 Kingdoms Kingdoms at War: Strategy Reborn League of War: Mercenaries Legendary: Game of Heroes Lords & Castles Magic Rush: Heroes Rise of the Kings Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes Throne: Kingdom at War War Ages: Legend of Kings War Commander: Rogue Assault War of Thrones
- 10. 1. From Russia with High ARPDAU
- 42. When it comes down to it… =
- 43. Better at: •Explicit linear progress •Social proof Better at: •Sense of ownership •Narrative
- 46. Lessons • Other ways to show progress in a level-based puzzle game
- 47. Lessons • Other ways to show progress in a level-based puzzle game • There is still room for innovation in this arena
- 48. Lessons • Other ways to show progress in a level-based puzzle game • There is still room for innovation in this arena • A little bit of innovation goes a long way
- 49. Lessons • Other ways to show progress in a level-based puzzle game • There is still room for innovation in this arena • A little bit of innovation goes a long way • The network effect
- 50. 2. The Rise and Fall…and Rise…and Fall of a Royale Empire
- 54. Why? • Very stale metagame • Progress grinding to a halt • Frustrating Legendary Cards
- 55. v
- 63. Lessons • Even a great game can fade from poor live ops • Great live ops can turn around a game • Strong, enticing user communication • Content is still king
- 64. 3. The Bad Boyfriend Game
- 71. Is there a bad boyfriend game?
- 73. Show video of the game
- 77. What makes it work? Let’s dissect it
- 80. It was right there! The angle of the camera helps
- 82. The color swap mechanic is challenging and satisfying.
- 84. Conclusion • Casual games can be very difficult, and successful, if the mechanic is clear and simple. • Games can treat you really badly, if the sex is really really good.
- 85. 4. Get the Message?
- 91. iMessage - Things You Need to Know - #1 The iMessage app store is all about sticker packs.
- 95. iMessage - Things You Need to Know - #2 Discoverability is … poor
- 116. Messenger - Things You Need to Know - #1 Here are all the ways you can monetize an Instant Game: [This space intentionally left blank.]
- 126. Recapping… iMessage • First out of the gate • Poor discoverability • Mostly about sticker packs • Leading game is a collection of mini-games Facebook Messenger (Instant Games) • Iterating more quickly • No way to monetize yet • Leading game is a shmup
- 127. So, Why Bother? • Platforms evolving • Remember Asia • The chance to be truly social
- 128. 5. NintenDo’s and Don’t’s
- 150. Lessons • Classic gaming brands have pull – especially for downloads • Can overcome resistance to novel gameplay • Monetization trumps brand • No love for Try & Buy • Rules of genre
- 151. 6. Notable Designs
- 152. Casual Sports
- 157. Not So Idle Game
- 160. Turn Based Mechanics
- 165. Thanks for listening! Steve Meretzky – steve.meretzky@king.com Dave Rohrl – dave@mobilegamedoctor.com Juan Gril – juan@flowplay.com Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to the Year in Mobile Games. I’m Steve Meretzky, and I’m joined by my two long-time collaborators, Dave Rohrl … and Juan Gril. After a couple of years during which it felt like change in the mobile game space was slowing, the last year delivered plenty of interesting developments.
- The builder genre, or as it’s sometimes called, the Invest and Express category, seems to be on life support. This is the genre, in the form of Farm Town and Farmville on Facebook, that established free-to-play gaming as a mass market phenomenon just 8 years ago.
- Let’s look at the top-25 grossing games on the three major mobile platforms: iPhone, iPad, and Android. When we did this talk two years ago, 9 of those 75 top slots were held by invest and express games.
- Last year at this time, again, 9 of those 75 slots were invest and express. But today?
- Just two of those top-grossing 75 slots is a builder game… Hay Day, at #16 on iPad, and Township, barely making it at #24 slot on Android. Soon, it feels like the genre will vanish completely from the top charts. Is this the end of an era, or just a low-point in the cycles we’ve seen over the years in so many genres?
- Chinese game companies have been acquiring non-Chinese game companies for years, most notably, gaming giant Tencent. But now we’re seeing a rash of game company acquisitions by Chinese NON-game companies, trying to take advantage of the fact that the Chinese stock market gives a higher valuation to game companies than other stock markets do. These companies include a construction conglomerate, a poultry supplier, and a peroxide manufacturer, which in May paid $1 billion for the company that makes My Talking Tom. However, Chinese regulators are starting to crackdown on these oddball marriages.
- In June, at WWDC, Apple announced a major redesign of the App Store, to be included with iOS 11. Apparently, it will have a lot more editorial content. More significantly, all the Top Charts will be removed from the public-facing sections of the App Store, which should have a huge impact on how games are launched and marketed.
- Finally, the last year has continued the requirement that all midcore mobile titles must be named by the same automated name generator. These are all titles of games released in the last 18 months.
- But fortunately, even those the names all sound alike, at least they achieve a huge amount of differentiation with their wide diversity of app icons.
- For our first topic of the day, we turn to the Level-Based Progression Genre.
- This genre was originally defined by King’s Saga games, such as Candy Crush and Bubble Witch.
- What innovation we’ve seen in that formula since then has been tinkering with the progression map, such as in Gummy Drop, [CLICK] where you collect building resources in the levels, [CLICK] and use them to build buildings along the progression path.
- But this past year or so, we’ve seen some interesting innovation in the genre, from a company a couple of hundred miles northeast of Moscow, called Playrix.
- Previously, they were mostly known for a moderately successful building game, Township.
- Then, about 18 months ago, they ported an old web-based game called Fishdom to the mobile platforms.
- It features a fish tank filled with anthropomorphic fish, who appear to be designed [CLICK] to come as close as legally possible to certain other famous fish.
- The levels in Fishdom are pretty standard match-three stuff. The artwork isn’t impressive.
- As is typical, if you fail the level, you lose a heart. You also get Sad Baby Octopus.
- But if you win the level, in addition to unlocking the next level, you also earn some soft currency….
- …which you can spend in a store to buy decorations for your fish tank.
- As you place each decoration, you earn “Beauty Points”, which unlock power-ups to use in the match-three levels.
- In addition, there’s very light nurturing gameplay, such as feeding your fish…
- …and cleaning the tank.
- And the fish talk to you, praising your gameplay. Fishdom has been a solid performer, consistently in the Top 50 grossing apps on all platforms, and often popping into the Top 25 on iPad.
- Then, about 11 months ago, Playrix followed up Fishdom with the release of another match-3 game, Gardenscapes.
- Again, Playrix has innovated on the meta-game. In this case, you have inherited a large estate with many formal gardens which have fallen into disrepair.
- As you play the levels, rather than progressing on a linear path, you are restoring your gardens. As time goes by, [CLICK] more of your gardens look like this, [CLICK] but there are still plenty of woeful ones like this to drive you to keep playing.
- The main NPC is a stuffy butler character named Austin, who suggests the next logical task in fixing up the gardens.
- These tasks appear on a mission list. Each mission has a cost, usually one or two stars…
- …where a star is the reward for the successful completion of one level.
- So one sequence of missions…
- …might be to restore a treehouse…
- …then to paint it…
- …then build a stream around it…
- …then build a bridge across the stream.
- In addition to stars, completing levels earns you some coins.
- These can be used within the level gameplay, to buy more moves. Or they can be used in the meta-game, to speed up build timers.
- The match-3 gameplay, though solid mechanically, is weak artistically. Perhaps because Playrix originally built Gardenscapes as a hidden object game. In fact, the game was already in soft launch when Playrix decided to do a last-minute pivot to match-3. Their bet was that match-3 would monetize better than hidden object, and would also have much lower content creation costs.
- Did the bet pay off? Gardenscapes has been performing even better than Fishdom, consistently in the Top 25, and starting to occasionally break into the Top 10. Furthermore, from what we can derive from public data, the average revenue per player is significantly higher for Fishdom and Gardenscapes than it is for other Level-Based Progression apps.
- Why? What explains this success? Is it the power of giving players the ability to creatively express themselves by decorating their fish tank or garden? That may be the case with Fishdom, but it’s certain not the case with Gardenscapes.
- Unlike the classic “invest and express” games, in Gardenscapes you have almost no decorative agency. About the most choice you ever get is picking a style of bench, or deciding on a color for the treehouse.
- In fact, when it comes down to it, your garden in Gardenscapes is just a Saga map, but expressing your progress in a new way. It’s neither better nor worse, but it is new and different.
- A Saga-style meta-game is better at [CLICK] explicitly showing your progress in a discrete, understandable way. [CLICK] and it’s more social, in that it shows your linear progress versus that of your friends. [CLICK] A Gardenscapes-style meta-game is better at [CLICK] giving players a feeling of ownership over the game space. [CLICK] And it’s probably better for delivering an in-game storyline.
- And, there’s been an added benefit for Playrix to the success of their new match-3 games. These hits seem to be boosting the performance of the company’s venerable Township game, a game now almost three years old. And that rise in revenue is occurring across every platform.
- And you can see the same benefit in other metrics as well… In daily revenue, both Fishdom and Township were [CLICK] flat at around $75K per day, but now [CLICK] are on an upward trend and passing the $150K per day range. [CLICK] The Installed Base of both older games were [CLICK] flat at about a million installs, but in the [CLICK] Gardenscapes era are now growing again.
- The lessons of these Playrix games. [CLICK] First, if you doing a Level-Based Progression game, think about new ways to show player’s their progress in the game, beyond just numbered progression along a linear path. And, more generally, innovate at the meta-game level when trying to enter any crowded and established genre.
- And, even though this is one of the most crowded and competitive spaces in mobile gaming, the success of Playrix shows that there’s room for innovation, and that that innovation will be rewarded by the market.
- Like humans and chimpanzees, Gardenscapes and other Level-Based Progression games share 98% of their DNA. While Gardenscapes has clearly innovated, it’s only innovated a few baby steps away from the proven model … and by doing so, proven that a little bit of innovation goes a long way.
- Finally, a hit game doesn’t just contribute the revenues that that one game is generating … thanks to the network effect, it can lift the performance in all the games in a company’s portfolio.
- Last year, I spoke to you all about the excitement and potential of Clash Royale, a new kind of mobile strategy game from Supercell. The game was notable for a number of pioneering features and approaches.
- And the results were quite spectacular at first. The game debuted at #4 top grossing in the US and stayed in the top 4 for a solid 3 months. But then something started to happen. The game started to show a strong, steady decline in revenue. These were still great numbers, mind you, but not what Clash Royale was used to.
- Super smart people like the Deconstructor of Fun, And even huge idiots like this guy were talking about the reasons for the game’s downfall.
- But then in August, a miracle happened A wizard created a fire spirit that was only supposed to last for a day, but instead it burned for 8 days and 8 nights. But seriously, unlike most mobile games that start to see a steady, sustained revenue decline, Clash Royale’s revenue bounced back bigly. And it has continued to hold a top 4 position on the grossing charts since.
- Why did this change come about? The answer is actually pretty simple. The team overhauled their approach to live operations.
- They added challenges – a game mode that players to join tournaments and get matched up against players with similar records. They can play at their leisure until they either lose 3 games or win 12, then they receive rewards based on their records. In the last couple of months, they have gone a step further. In addition to the always-on crown challenges, they have added a variety of special tournaments formats. Approximately every two weeks they run a different special tournament in parallel with the permanent, regular tournament offering, giving players access to special gameplay variants not normally available in the game.
- The also overhauled their content release strategy. Previously, content releases were very sporadic and added a bunch of new units all at the same time. This led to a metagame that was static for months, then suddenly got massively disrupted. They shifted that pattern to rolling out a single new unit every couple of weeks. This means that every 14 days the metagame gets a little disrupted, forcing players to change up their decks to keep up with the latest units, keeping everybody’s gameplay constantly fresh. And they precede each unit’s release with a special challenge that gives players a change to play with the new cards a week before they are generally available and – if they do well – add those cards to their collection before they are available to the general public.
- They’ve also added strong weekly cadences to the game. Monday-Wednesday every week, the Clan Chest appears. Clan members contribute to the Clan Chest by knocking down enemy towers. At the end of 3 days, all clan members receive rewards based on the total number of towers destroyed by the clan. They have also made every Sunday “Epic Sunday” where extra-rare cards become available in the store and for donation by clan members. These features combine to create great incentives to log in at particular times during the week.
- And they’ve done a great job of using their in-game News Royale feature to promote all of these features and events, along with other fun features like their Clash-a-Rama branding videos.
- Late in the spring, the team launched a very large new feature, 2v2 battles where two players play simultaneously on each team. Then in the summer, the team decided to significantly cut the pace of their content releases in favor of a variety of events all featuring 2v2 gameplay, hoping that players would value this as highly as they did the stream of new units.
- Unfortunately, players didn’t respond as hoped, apparently feeling that the leverage of the new feature didn’t add as much to the game as the stream of new units that preceded it.
- I was walking with my wife
- She explained the bad boyfriend shoes
- She explained the bad boyfriend shoes
- Of course they are, and the perfect example is Chameleon Run
- Chameleon Run is pretty simple, use the right side of the screen to jump, use the left side of the screen to change color. Your avatar needs to be of the same color the platform he is walking on.
- But with these very simple rules, you can create very interesting levels.
- Which can be pretty stressful to beat.
- The camera angle allows the player to watch what’s ahead of the next jump, as well as if there are alternative routes in the level.
- The film producer Samuel Goldwyn famously told his writers, “if you want to send a message, use Western Union.” But who knows how that quote might have turned out…
- …if he’d said it in today’s mobile-driven world, with it’s proliferating messaging platforms? There’s no doubt that companies are going crazy over messaging platforms, and it’s not hard to see why.
- One only has to look toward Asia, where messaging platforms like We Chat and KakaoTalk have become so dominant and fully-featured that they’ve become de facto operating systems. This is China’s WeChat, where you can order takeout, call a taxi, buy movie tickets … [CLICK] and even make a doctor’s appointment. And, of course, play games.
- In the English speaking world, there are two messaging platforms that are getting into games in a big way: Apple’s iMesssage, and Facebook’s Messenger. Other messaging platforms haven’t yet gotten their act together yet. [CLICK] Let’s start by looking at the first entrant into games, iMessage.
- iMessage opened to apps with the launch of the iMessage app store last September.
- The first thing you need to know about the iMessage app store, is that it’s not about games… it’s about sticker packs.
- Just look at the iMessage app store. [CLICK] Stickers stickers stickers everywhere.
- These stickers are packs of small images that you download and install. [CLICK] You can then choose one and append it to your iMessages, just like we’ve been doing with emojis for years.
- Look at this chart from appfigures. [CLICK] Sticker packs make up 80% of the 200 top-grossing apps, [CLICK] with the games category a distant and dismal fifth.
- The second thing you need to know about iMessage apps is that discoverability leaves a lot to be desired. Let’s take a look at the user flow of finding an iMessage game.
- Here we are at the iMessage home screen. Tap this little carat…
- Then this icon…
- Now this non-descript icon…
- Then, tap here.
- At last, the app store! Tap the “Categories” button…
- Select “Games”. And at long last, after 6 taps…
- …we can start perusing iMessage games. [CLICK] However, even here on the Games tab of the store, you see that half the screen is still devoted to sticker packs!
- Let’s take a look at the #1 game on iMessage, Game Pigeon.
- It’s a package featuring genericized versions of a lot of tried-and-true parlor games, such as Chess, Checkers, Pool, Battleship, Connect Four, Boggle, and many more. But what makes Game Pigeon an iMessage game?
- It’s because the message stream is used for each step of the flow. Within a message thread, you challenge a friend to play of the Game Pigeon mini-games.
- That challenge includes a call-to-action which takes you into Game Pigeon, with the appropriate mini-game selected.
- At the end of play you get a results screen, with a “Send” button…
- Which posts your score back to the shared messaging thread. The flows into and out of the messaging thread are handled quite well.
- Okay, let’s take a look [CLICK] at the other contender, Facebook Messenger.
- Facebook launched games in Facebook Messenger at the very end of November, and offering they call “Instant Games”.
- At launch, flow and discoverability were just as bad as on iMessage, but Facebook has been iterating the platform much more rapidly. [CLICK] There’s now a Games Hub, which you access by tapping this adorable little console controller-shaped icon.
- Unlike iMessage, there’s no app store per se, just a curated list of several dozen games, with several being added each month. [CLICK] At the top of the Games Hub, there a section showing the newest games.
- Next is a section of games in which something has happened that requires your attention.
- After that are your recently-played games. And finally, below those (not shown here) is a list of all the remaining games.
- These games use the Messenger channel to share high scores and leaderboards, [CLICK] or to notify you when it’s your turn in a turned-based game. So, in many ways, these are very similar to iMessage offerings.
- But with one big difference, which is how you monetize an Instant Game. [CLICK] That’s right … there is currently NO WAY to make a penny from creating a game for Messenger. You can’t sell virtual goods. You can’t have ads. You can’t even link out to an external game, and monetize via that external app. Facebook is promising in-game ads this year, but other forms of monetization may never happen.
- Let’s take a look at the #1 game on Messenger, Everwing, which has been getting around 10 million unique players per month.
- The game is a classic top-down scrolling shoot ‘em up, or shmup, [CLICK] with sessions punctuated by intermittent boss fights.
- But there’s so much more to Everwing.
- You can use your coins to level up your characters, increasing their firepower.
- You can equip your character with sidekicks, to do extra damage.
- There are timed quests, to level up your characters and sidekicks when you’re not playing.
- There are group boss raids, where you and your friends must grind away at a single boss over several days to defeat it and earn phat loot.
- There are leaderboards for each group of friends you’re playing Everwing with.
- And Events. And tournaments. And weekly champs. All in all, a huge amount of features for a game which, right now, cannot earn a single dollar!
- To recap… [CLICK] iMessage was the first platform to offer games. It has poor discoverability, and most of the action is around sticker packs, not games. The leading game on the platform is a collection of classic mini-games. [CLICK] Facebook Messenger started behind, but is iterating more quickly. But there’s still no way to get any revenue. The leading game on the platform is a deeply-featured shoot’em up.
- So given the issues around discoverability and monetization, why bother? [CLICK] Well, these platforms are still in their infancy, and are changing rapidly, and today’s flaws aren’t necessarily permanent. [CLICK] And remember the case of WeChat and KakaoTalk… the Asian market has predicted North American trends in so many ways; if Western messaging platforms go in the same direction as their Asian cousins, these could be THE mobile gaming platform of the future. [CLICK] But most importantly, messaging platforms are an inherently social platform, and games played within those environments might represent our best chance yet to make truly social games.
- For years, beginning in 2011, Satoru Iwata said that Nintendo would never do Facebook or mobile games.
- This made many gamers – including me – sad.
- But in 2014 Iwata-San had a change of heart, announcing a partnership with Japanese mobile giant DeNA. And over the past year, we’ve started to see the first fruits of that collaboration, along with some interesting offerings from the partially Nintendo-owned Pokemon Company.
- In the last year, we’ve seen 4 major games come to market with Nintendo IP’s – Pokemon Go Super Mario Run Fire Emblem Heroes And Magikarp Jump
- And so far, I have to imagine that Mario is pretty happy with the results.
- Pokemon Go, the first of these games, launched in July 2016. It was not a true Nintendo effort, but was built by Google spinout Niantic Corporation, with the Pokemon Company, partially owned by Nintendo, licensing the IP and consulting heavily on production. It wasn’t the first Pokemon licensed mobile product, but it was the first one intended for an adult audience.
- In case anyone hasn’t played it, Pokemon Go is an unique new genre of free-to-play game that could only exist on mobile. Players use their real-world geolocation data to find wandering pokemon And capture them in a simple AR arcade minigame Then level them up, evolve them, and fight against other players’ Pokemon for control of Pokemon gyms scattered across the landscape. It’s a free-to-play game that monetizes players through a variety of consumables and permanent upgrades.
- The game made headlines about its massive early success, becoming the fastest mobile game to hit 10M downloads and $500M in revenue despite a number of obvious blemishes, and in January research firm Sensor Tower estimated that the game had grossed over $1B. The game started off at the very top of the grossing charts and, after some early struggles, seems to have hit its live ops stride. After hovering in the teens for a while, the game has been bouncing through the upper reaches of the top 10 for the last several months.
- Now let’s talk about Magikarp Jump, the most recent Pokemon company released, which arrived on our shores in late May.
- The game has a very simple loop. First you catch a random Magikarp, which you can pay hard currency to upgrade. Then it swims in a pond where fruits appear every few seconds. You tap on the fruit to gain “jumping points”. Every 30 minutes you train it, basically pushing a button and getting a random number of jumping points. And then you match your Magikarp against another Magikarp in a single player gauntlet where you push a button and watch the Pokemon with more jumping points win. You keep competing until you hit your level cap and lose, and then you start the cycle again by catching a new Magikarp with a higher level cap. Overall, the game is minimally interactive, and feels like a very polished idle game where you never get to completely stop tapping.
- In the way of most mobile idle games – except for the ones I work on ;), monetization has been pretty mediocre and appears to occur early in the player life cycle.
- Next up is Super Mario Run, the first game created and published by Nintendo as part of its partnership with DeNA.
- The game plays like a simplified version of a classic 2D Mario platformer with some smart adaptation for smart phones, like having Mario run constantly and using a one-touch control to manage jumping.
- It adds some interesting new features as well, like the ability to race against the “ghost” of another player, with the faster player winning prizes. And a lightweight decorative metagame that allows players to build out their own personal mushroom kingdom.
- Unlike the other two Nintendo games released, Super Mario Run is not a free-to-play game. It gives the user the first three levels for free, then unlocks the other 21 levels for a one-time purchase of $9.99 – a very unusual choice for a mobile game in 2016 – especially for a high profile licensed title.
- The was also the subject of one of the largest marketing campaigns in the history of mobile games. It had a hero banner in the App Store for months, even before the game actually launched. And the push paid off. Awareness of the game was huge, and it has been a steady fixture in the top downloads list every day since its launch, especially on Android.
- And it first it made a ton of money as Mario fans paid the one-time fee to unlock the full product. Unfortunately that revenue proved to be unsustainable, since the game has no way to further monetize those players.
- The most recent launch from Nintendo is Fire Emblem Heroes, which debuted worldwide earlier this month.
- The game is based on a relatively small Nintendo license that features heroes engaging in turn-based battles on a tactical map. That core gameplay has been smartly updated for mobile by reducing the size of maps and armies to create fun, strategic, bite-sized battles that feel quite different from the usual RPG fare.
- It then takes this tactical core and overlays it with a variety of familiar features and monetization approaches from DeNA’s signature mobile RPG’s.
- The game has been in the top 50 grossing since the day it released and looks to be holding up well. In fact, research firm SensorTower reports that the game has grossed more than $110M with just over 11M downloads
- One tap basketball game.
- Racing games with just two buttons on screen: one for changing lanes, the other one to get a boost.