How InnoGames remade a game bought from Wooga in its own way

Almost two years ago, the Warlords mobile game became the property of InnoGames. We tell you what difficulties the development team faced, forced to redo someone else’s title.

Change of owner

In 2016, Wooga, which went through a restructuring, focused on casual games. She immediately closed the young studio Black Anvil Games, laying off 40 employees. The turn-based strategy Warlords, released by the studio a month before, did not correspond to the new course. But, fortunately, InnoGames, the creator of Forge of Empires and Tribal Wars, became interested in her.

After buying the game, InnoGames stated that it plans to support the project for many years. She renamed the game Warlords of Aternum and began to “repair” it.

The “repair” stage

Remaking Warlords, InnoGames faced a number of difficulties. Some of them were told by the head of product development Sebastian Seber (Sebastian Seeber).

• The team had to learn how to work with code that was not written by her. It took a considerable time for everything to work properly. For example, only one zabagovannogo unit was brought to mind for several weeks.
• It was also necessary to correct the balance in PvE and PvP. When the game fell into the hands of InnoGames, it was dominated by one or two units. Players improved only them all the time and used them in all battles, and the rest, in fact, were ignored.
• In addition, InnoGames implemented all the changes to the game, keeping in mind that Warlords has a community. And it already loves the game as it is, which means that its reaction to changes in balance and other aspects may be negative.

Nevertheless, the team believed that it would achieve improvements in many areas. With each update, the game became more and more similar to other strategies from the InnoGames portfolio, writes PocketGamer.

Chronology

• October 2016. Warlords has been released. In the first month, the game earned $ 264 thousand.
• November 2016 — January 2017. Monthly revenue reaches a plateau in the region of $ 50 thousand.
• February 2017. InnoGames buys the title.
• March 2018. The graph shows a jump to $118 thousand. This happened after the team released four push notification updates one after the other.
• July 2018. Monthly income has grown to $184 thousand due to the fact that InnoGames has solved the problem of shifting the interface beyond the screen of some devices.
• November 2018. Monthly revenue reached $353 thousand. At the moment, this is the peak value for the game.

The data is provided by the DataMagic portal.

Result

The last major update of Warlords of Aternum took place at the end of November. Two new combat units have been added to the game. After that, the company’s analysts estimated that the duration of the gaming session on Android and iOS increased by 20% at once.

Currently, the total number of installations of the game has almost reached 2.5 million. The total revenue of the game is $3.3 million.

Also on the topic:

• InnoGames earned €130 million in 2016Wooga fires 10% of employees