“Mysterious House” overcame the mark of 50 million users
The fritupley hidden “Mysterious House” was installed more than 50 million times. In honor of this event App2Top.ru I talked with Maxim Donskikh, president of Game Insight, about the history of the game and its genre.
Hi! Congratulations on the mark of 50 million players, which the project recently overcame. The game has been going to this since March 2011. This is a long time. During this time, both the company and the market itself have changed a lot. Despite the changes, the game, as far as I understand, remains one of the flagships of Game Insight. How much of the company’s total revenue is accounted for by the game as a percentage?
Hi! It all started earlier — in the fall of 2010. It was then that the very first version of the “Mysterious House” was released on the VKontakte network. By the way, she is still very active. Then there was the Facebook version, mobile versions, a super successful launch in Japanese social networks and much more. In a way, the game really reflects all the important stages of the development of Game Insight.
As for the specific percentages of the company’s income, I am not ready to announce the figure. I will say this: this is a significant proportion, but not prevailing over others. It so happened from the very beginning (and we actively support this model) that there are no one or two dominant titles in our profit structure. The line of games is balanced by genres, platforms and audiences so that the company’s business does not depend on the success of a single game or even on our position on a separate platform.
We call this model sustainable free-to-play (sustainable free-to-play, as sustainable energy — sustainable energy based on inexhaustible resources). My friend and our CEO Tolya Ropotov talked in detail about this model at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco, so I will not dwell on this in detail.
“Mysterious House” – object search screen
Mystery Manor was a breakthrough, the first full-fledged frituplein hidden. Please tell us about the history of the project, how did you come to such a concept, why did you decide to make a hidden then?
Here you need to go from afar. The team that formed the backbone of Game Insight, at one time passed the school of browser and client MMOs. And that’s why I felt good fritupley (or you can also say “games as a service”) long before his arrival in social and mobile games, unlike most other companies in the world that were then on the market. And now a completely new huge market has appeared, adapted to this business model. Due to the simplicity of development, a huge number of people who wanted to hit the jackpot rushed there, but few had experience in creating and, more importantly, supporting, developing and long-term operating shareware games.
So we started to transfer our experience of large MMOs to a new sphere. But since the audience was much broader and casual, they began to look for a new shell — new genres, or rather, to adapt the old, proven ones. The market was just forming, so we had to constantly invent and experiment. So, we first came up with a fritupley citybuilder, taking casual time managers as a basis, and then we started looking for something even more “feminine”, and the choice fell on hiddens. We analyzed what and how the casual audience plays at Big Fish Games, and decided that the aunts who buy a new paid hidden every week will be happy to play one, but endless. And pay regularly for new content inside it.
“Mysterious House” – location selection screen
As far as I understand, one of the main problems that the development team faced was the high rate of content consumption in hiddens. And it was solved by the introduction of collections that stimulated players to return to the passed locations again and again. But this, so to speak, is what lies on the surface. What other important decisions and mechanics, in your opinion, played an important role in the success of the game?
To answer this question, you need to go back to the MMO again. If we discard the whole “wrapper”, then everything is based on grinding, that is, multiple (and in Korean games many, many, many) repetition of the same actions by the player to advance in the game. From the point of view of the game design of a shareware project, it is extremely important to encourage the player to do this, stretching the pleasure of advancing in the game and, consequently, slowing down the consumption of content, which, due to inaccessibility, pleases more than full abundance. Here we had to come up with a lot of cool pieces — including the collections you mentioned.
It sounds very corny, but not for VKontakte sample of 2010!
Well, to make it even more interesting for the player, as in successful MMOs, we wrapped the grind with a thousand story quests. So much literary text has been written that it is possible to publish a separate series of paperbacks: in terms of the number of words, “The Mysterious House” is ahead of “War and Peace” and is approaching the complete works of Shakespeare.
This, by the way, is about the volume of content. With all the game design tricks, a successful frituplein hiddene still needs a lot of it. It is important that players see that the game is constantly evolving — then they stay in it for years. So we had to immediately take a high rate of rolling out updates and maintain it all these years on all platforms. This is, in fact, a titanic work, and many thanks to the team, or rather, to the teams, since there are several of them working on the “Mysterious House”.
“Mysterious House” – quest screen
By the way, strapping, as time has shown, is great not only for hiddens, but, for example, for three-in-a-row. For example, much of Mystery Manor can be seen today in Cradle of Empires by Awem. At the same time, Game Insight, as far as I know, has not tried to implement it in games of other genres. Why?
Just the opposite: we constantly transfer our successful experience to a variety of genres. Sometimes in a new environment, features take root better, sometimes worse, it depends on many factors. For example, in a purely female game “In the kitchen” such a “casual grind” was completely appropriate, and in a brutal male Running Shadow turned out to be absolutely contraindicated: there, the audience is ready to kill monsters by the hundreds just for the sake of the process, but not to collect any collections.
During its history, Game Insight has released a large number of very beautiful hiddens with their own style, approach to art, to work with the interface (this style, by the way, was adopted by the same Awem and MyTona). Could you tell us a little about this style, because the first steps to it were made in Mystery Manor? How is this style/approach characterized in the company itself, what are its principles?
I am not an artist, so it is difficult for me to answer this question, but among ourselves we call this style “expensive-rich” or “gypsy chic”. But seriously, the art of the “Mysterious House” touches some strings in the soul of an audience older than you and me. There is something nostalgic about it, memories of former luxury with golden candelabra, polished mahogany and marble stairs worn down over several centuries.
Speaking more prosaically, in the art of such games, in my opinion, versatility is very important. Firstly, it should be equally well perceived by players from any country. Secondly, it can combine a variety of themes: from a love novel to a mystical vampire thriller, light cyberpunk or in general — fairy tales with mermaids and the Snow Queen. All this is perfectly combined stylistically within the framework of one universe. And, thirdly, any decent artist should be able to master this style so that we can ensure a uniform flow of content and not depend on one or two performers at the same time.
Mysterious House – Collections screen
I want to go back to the company’s hidden portfolio again now. A lot of projects have been released. Very high-quality, interesting (in particular, at one time I was very passionate about Legacy of Transylvania). Despite this, the company currently supports (actively releases updates) only two — Mystery Manor and Alice in the Mirrors of Albion. Why? Was it about the cannibalization of the audience or was it related to something else, what exactly?
The important question here is how women’s consumption of hiddens is arranged — how many pieces they can play at the same time. It’s not about cannibalization, but the fact that there is a finite number of audiences, and these people will choose the deepest and most elaborate story. So, if there is some cool feature that you want to make, then it is almost always better to do it in an existing game than to develop a new one.
But at the same time, we have a desire to constantly try something radically different, and several hiddens were made as part of a variety of experiments: different settings, a different balance, the introduction of other game mechanics. There were also quite risky experiments with monetization and progression models. For example, the arcade version of the “Mysterious House” is Mystery Manor Blitz with the passage of rooms in a hard—coded time.
Mystery Manor Blitz
Along with the market, I am sure, Mystery Manor also changed. Could you tell us how much (and exactly how) the project has changed during its existence (at least the main aspects)?
If you ask the game designers of the “Mysterious House” about this, you can hear a story for a few hours, because over the years the project has become so overgrown with functionality that now it is probably our most sophisticated game in terms of the number and depth of mechanics used. But if we try to highlight the main one, then this is an increase in the number of social features. It all started with a simple exchange of gifts with friends, and ended with joint raids on bosses and real clan wars. Yes, in hidden. Yes, for a female audience. And this, among other things, is a very important factor in keeping active players, because they constantly feel “social pressure”: if I quit the game, I will let my friends (oh, that is, girlfriends) down, just like in World of Warcraft.
The next question has a bit in common with the previous one. Have the hidden players themselves changed in five years? Has their approach to content consumption changed, perhaps they started liking one thing and stopped paying attention to something else? Which game aspects were popular in the game 5 years ago, which are interesting to players now? Could you tell me about it?
The answer is pretty obvious — people have become more demanding. They’ve already seen a lot of games, so it’s pretty hard to surprise them. They spend a minimum of time getting acquainted with the new game, and if something didn’t immediately catch on, then come on, goodbye. What else can I highlight: as I have already said, even the casual audience is increasingly immersed in social aspects, including competitive ones — all sorts of tops, ratings and even direct confrontation with other players. We have seen by example how women 40+ at first treated cooperative gameplay like joint boss raids with great distrust, and now they are happy to participate even in clan wars.
Mysterious House – hard currency store
As the president of the company, you see a difference in the approach to the development of projects of different genres. Could you name any features in the work on hidden objects, what should be remembered when creating them?
The genre is really special. The external simplicity of creating hiddens hides the difficulties of working with a session game, when you need to maintain a sense of the importance and interest of each session, even if the player goes through the same room for the hundredth time. It is necessary to maintain the level of difficulty at the same time, and at the same time make the player feel that he has learned some patterns and started playing better, while also moving him forward in time. This is rarely achieved in games with endless and “smooth” development like bodybuilders — there is no feeling of “hooray, I learned how to build buildings much better than before.”
And the last — double — question: would you advise developers today to start working on a frituplein hidden, and does Game Insight itself plan to deal with them in the future?
Any genre is good if you know how to cook it. So if the soul lies to the frituplein hiddens and there is an understanding of how to do them, there is no reason not to do it. It’s the same with Game Insight — we love this wonderful genre and are not going to abandon it.
Thanks for the interview!
