How Small Giant Games Achieved Success with Empires & Puzzles

Timo Soininen, director of the Finnish studio Small Giant Games, told VentureBeat why the team concentrated all its efforts on one game, Empires & Puzzles, and how it managed to attract multimillion-dollar investments for it. We offer a brief retelling of the material.

Empires & Puzzles was released in 2017. It’s a mix of three-in-a-row, role-playing and strategy. In the year of release, the game earned $ 33 million, and in February 2018, Small Giant Games received $41 million in investments to support and develop the title.

According to Timo Soyninen, in 2013, when Small Giant Games was opened, the mobile market was already crowded with games and it was difficult for a small studio to succeed. At first, Small Giant was engaged in one-day social games and tried to understand what the project needed to have a future.

The studio took up the development of Empires & Puzzles in 2016, abandoning other projects. A team of 12 people decided to stop experimenting with casual games and take up midcore, where there are more opportunities for monetization. At the same time, the team tried to use their experience in developing casual games to make Empires & Puzzles understandable and accessible to the widest possible audience.

At one of the game jams, the guys found a suitable idea for the main gameplay: to connect three-in-a-row with a role-playing action (approx. – in fact, this is not some original idea, such hybrids appeared on the Asian market back in 2012, for example Puzzle & Dragons). Additional mechanics perfectly fit this basis: base development, collecting and upgrading heroes, PvP, PvE and network alliance modes. At the same time, the user interface remained as simple and understandable as possible.

One of the most important decisions that ensured the success of the game was early testing. All the previous projects Small Giant has been carrying for a long time before showing to the public. Here, the test version was released two weeks after the start of development.

The fact that the testers are passionate about the game at such an early stage, despite the poor graphics, gave the developers hope. It was decided to make testing weekly. By the time of launch, the game was completely polished in accordance with the data obtained during testing.

The studio had no experience in marketing such projects. Small Giant has developed its own analytics system to understand what business strategy is needed for the success of the project in today’s market. The studio could have turned to outside analysts for help, but decided to do everything on its own — Soyninen is convinced that developers need a deep understanding of the realities of the market if they want to remain successful.

When Empires and Puzzles started, significant funds were put into marketing. In the year of the release of Small Giant, they raised almost $ 6 million in investments exclusively for the promotion of the game, and this year they spent another $ 8 million.

The project is very attractive to investors due to its rapid growth: the game has earned $130 million in total to date, it has 50 million downloads and a DAU of more than a million people.

Timo is sure that the potential of the game has not been exhausted, so the studio, which now has 35 employees, continues to actively work on it.

However, Soyninen admitted that work on a new project has begun in the studio, but he does not give any specific information on this yet.

Also on the topic:

• Battlers are one of the most common genres among the top—grossing games
• Finnish game studio raised $3.1 million

Source: VentureBeat