The creator of Episode named the reasons for the popularity of the genre of interactive novels
The head of the Pocket Gems studio, Michael Dawson, told why interactive novels for mobile are such a success. The flagship title Pocket Gems is the Episode interactive stories platform, which has gained more than 125 million downloads.
According to Dawson, the stories in Episode are so popular because they are simple, fast and exciting. Players go through an episode of the novel faster than they have time to get bored and switch from the game to social networks.
In addition, Episode attracts an audience that is usually not interested in video games at all. Thanks to the simple plots and the use of franchises of popular TV series, Episode stories are very popular among teenage girls.
Finally, Episode allows you not only to go through ready-made stories, but also to create them yourself. To date, about 100 thousand short stories written by players have been published on the platform.
Episode was released in 2014. By now, the application has become one of the leaders in the genre. According to Gamasutra last year, users have played the stories from the Episode library more than 2.5 billion times.
Interactive stories is a profitable genre of mobile games
According to the analytical company Apptopia, in February of this year, in the USA alone, the 7 most downloaded interactive novels on mobile generated $14 million on in-game purchases.
Major game publishers have already appreciated the potential of mobile stories and have started investing in their creators. Last year, Tencent invested $90 million in Pocket Gems. In addition, since the beginning of this year, Nexon publishing house has bought the American Pixelberry studio, and Ubisoft has acquired the French studio 1492.
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