Five reasons for the success of Summoners War

Since its release in 2014, the battler Summoners War: Sky Arena from Com2uS has earned $780 million. Since last March alone, $280 million has been received into the game’s piggy bank. Game designer Alexander Pashin shared with App2Top.ru your opinion about the reasons for the success of the game.

Alexander Pashin
Summoners War is a very complex project.

I would highlight five points thanks to which the game is commercially successful.

1. External simplicity

The user, entering the project for the first time, sees a mix of a builder and a classic battler: you improve buildings, collect creatures, send them on a mission. That’s all. But this is a deceptive impression, which only dissipates with time. When a player realizes that the game is harder than it seemed, he is already on the hook.

2. Evolv

Evolv, let me remind you, the improvement of some creatures through the sacrifice of others. For example, you have a dragon. You want him to get a number of bonuses and seriously increase the characteristics (evolve and get a new star). To do this, you need to find the same card and merge them.

Often this mechanics goes along with the experience cheat, again through sacrifice. That is, in order to pump one creature faster, you kill other cards.

As a rule, there are constantly not enough spending cards for generating experience in battlers, and for evolves, if you pump a rare creature, then it is difficult to find the second (and then the third, fourth, and so on). Plus, soft currency is spent on any improvement.

In Summoners War, this is complicated by the fact that there are really weak cards in the game. I chose the wrong monster for pumping – I lost time and, most likely, money. Given that the amount of time that needs to be spent to upgrade a star is growing exponentially, an error can cost a player very dearly.

At the same time, it is easy to make a mistake. There are a lot of maps. The choice of a monster for pumping is large.

The player’s ideal library should consist of five monsters of each of the five colors.

Now we consider how many sets a player should make: a set for protection from other players, a set for PvP, a set of PvE and five more sets made up of cards of the same color for completing special missions (for example, if a player passes fire missions, it is desirable for him to have only water monsters in the set).

When compiling each set, it is easy to make a mistake by choosing the wrong fighter to improve and destroying a good one when pumping.

3. Runes

Runes are another type of monster enhancement. To level up monsters, the player can insert runes into them.

Runes improve the characteristics of monsters. For example, you insert a pebble and your fighter gets a bonus to HP or DEF.

Runes can also be inserted incorrectly. And you can make a mistake twice. For the first time, inserting runes at random (I got a rune, inserted it into my favorite monster), and not with sets that improve the total effect of all runes. The second time was when I chose the wrong set for a particular monster.

4. Communication

The fourth reason for the success of the game is that the developers managed to establish communication between the players.

Communication is a very important component of the game. Suffice it to say that users can rate monsters, which can be seen in the description to it.

Communication is carried out in the game via a chat with a large number of rooms, which the player is free to change at his discretion. In one they will help to understand the rules, in the other they will just chat and so on.

5. Promotions

The fifth point that is important to note: the close work of the authors of Summoners War with stocks. Promotions are constantly taking place in the game. It’s not just about sales, but about offering sets of rare creatures and game currencies at a special price. The promotions are valid for a limited amount of time and change frequently.

Special attention in the game is paid to the first purchase. They work very subtly with this, they are able to stimulate the purchase with interesting offers.

By the way, about the builder in the game – it is almost formal and is a system for withdrawing money and slowing down the player’s progress over time.