Case study: The impact of the Hockey World Cup on the downloads of a themed game

How much the World Hockey Championship has affected the downloads of the sports game, — App2Top.ru the founder of PlayMobileFree Nikolay Rakushin told.

With the high price of installation and the poor availability of applications, attracting new users is becoming an increasing problem.

The leading players in the market solve it in different ways. But, as a rule, it all comes down to working with brands. Some are buying up popular licenses, hoping to reduce UA costs (Kabam, Glu). Others invest in the development of their own brands, wanting to make them the locomotives of sales (Rovio, MachineZone, UbiSoft).

In both cases, large resources are required, which many teams do not have. They need to come up with new ways to attract users that will not require large investments, but will be effective.

One of these solutions, which has not yet been widely adopted, may be the accounting of sports competitions in the line of regular updates or the release of thematic projects for such events.

Nikolay Rakushin, the founder of PlayMobileFree, told us about the effectiveness of one of these approaches.

PlayMobileFree is a small Moscow studio specializing in casual games. A year ago, the company launched the Mini Hockey Stars multiplayer PvP project on Google Play.

The project is dedicated to hockey. The mechanics of the game are vaguely reminiscent of Smash Land from Supercell. There is a hockey playing field. There are eight big pucks on it — two opposing teams and one small one. The task is to drive a small one into the opponent’s goal with big washers. The game is turn-based, online multiplayer.

The game was released a month before the start of the 2015 Ice Hockey World Championship,” Nikolay shares. Initially, the game was promoted using cross-traffic from other studio games. This, as well as getting the game into the category of new products on Google Play, helped the project reach the mark of 10 thousand downloads per day. After the game left the category of novelties, the number of downloads decreased to 2-3 thousand per day.

Repeated interest in the game on the part of users arose when the Championship began to come to an end, to the quarterfinals. That is, at the most intense and interesting time for sports fans, when it is decided who will get bronze, silver and gold.

At this stage, the game’s downloads have increased fivefold. In the Czech Republic, where the Championship was held at that time, the game reached 4th place in the overall top by downloads.

“Thanks to the momentum that the championship gave to the game, we got an incredibly long, fat and delicious tail,” Nikolai noted.

Nikolai believes that the adaptation of icons for all countries where the game was released also played a role in generating downloads. In Russia, for example, there were three washers on the icon — one ordinary, one with the flag of the USA, and the other with the flag of Russia. In the Czech Republic and Canada, the Russian flag, respectively, was changed to the flags of these countries.

By itself, the publication of a project or an update for a specific event can hardly become a universal solution for achieving high game metrics, as, indeed, the adaptation of marketing materials for each local market. But these tools, as the PlayMobileFree case shows, allow you to give the necessary push to the application, thereby reducing the cost of marketing tools.

See also:

• Does it make sense to release updates to games for sports competitions?

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