The story of two games after winning the Instant Games Cup
In September last year, Odnoklassniki (OK) held a competition for the best HTML5 project – Instant Games Cup (now, by the way, the second one is coming). Among its winners were the games Memoria and “WORLDS: Evolution”. We tell you how the fate of the projects turned out.
Memoria
About the project
A quiz game. Core gameplay is built on PvP. Five players synchronously answer a number of identical questions. The one who answers more questions correctly gets the whole pot for the level (gold) and stars. The latter are spent in meta on destroying obstacles and advancing on the map.
Memoria
History
The development of Memoria is a classic indie story. The co-founder of the Minsk studio, which has not yet received a name, Ivan Strigelsky has been freelancing with friends for a long time. When it became possible to attract more people to projects, they began to saw their own projects.
A year ago, it was decided to try to launch our own large HTML5 project for the web. As Ivan recalls, the game designer of the studio arrived and suggested that the team do it. Behind him was the design and visual part of the game, behind the rest of the staff was the code.
Cocos Creator was chosen as the framework. It was on him that they stopped for a simple reason. The engine has an editor in which it was convenient for the designer to assemble game scenes. Writing your own tools for the game from scratch would be too big a task.
However, there were no problems with the “boxed” functionality. “I had to make a lot of changes to the engine itself, which the Chinese did not finish,” Ivan says.
Four people (backend developer, frontend developer, content developer, artist/game designer) prepared the first release version of the game in two to three months. It was she who was sent to the competition, as a result of which in October she took 3rd place and won 400 thousand installations.
Memoria
The win came in handy. After a preliminary softlonch of the first version, the team realized by the numbers that the game was not working. It was necessary to make changes and measure the indicators each time, pouring traffic, which the team did not initially have.
According to Ivan, the main advantage of participating in the contest was that the traffic was given for free. The studio has the opportunity to calmly track the behavior of users, arrange funnels, do all the analytics at the expense of OK.
The traffic won did not flow en masse, but on request. After each update, it was possible to request a certain number of users, enough to test a hypothesis or just to collect metrics.
Thanks to the ability to test each new version on the attracted users, the team was able to achieve the desired indicators, spending only 50 thousand installations. However, to do this, she had to redo the entire game twice, and also almost completely redraw it.
Retention of Memoria of the first day (D1) on the web today is 25%. As the developer explains, it’s not worth comparing with mobile retention: “Retention is much lower on the web, it’s harder to keep users. For web projects, this is an acceptable value. There have been cases when the game showed 15-20% on the web, and in mobile, with general equals, it jumped up to 55%.”
Ivan is very pleased with both the participation and the fact that he managed to win in the Instant Games Cup. However, he notes that it has not yet been possible to recoup the development. The game is still “not very earning”. It is difficult to recoup it on one site. “We’ll have to take platforms en masse,” concludes Strigelsky.
“WORLDS: Evolution”
About the project
Midcore builder is about building your own civilization. One of the key features of the game is terraforming. The player can influence the landscape. At the same time, it does this in a non-standard way for games. For example, if you pour water on the grass, flowers will grow on it.
“WORLDS: Evolution”
History
The history of the appearance of “WORLDS: Evolution” as an HTML5 project is far from standard. The game itself is a mobile long—term construction from the St. Petersburg studio JoyBits, which became famous for the Doodle God series. The Worlds have been in development for at least five years. Their worldwide release took place last October.
Even before that, it was decided not only to enter the native market, but also to cover social platforms. To do this, it was necessary to rebuild the game already as an HTML5 application. JoyBits itself decided to focus on the native version, and gave porting and publishing on the web into the hands of Moscow OverGamez.
The latter has been specializing in porting and operating social projects for many years. The most famous and high—grossing game of the publishing house is “Rats”. The company also brought Goodgame Empire to Russian social networks.
According to Tatiana Frolova, COO OverGamez, they won 600 thousand downloads at the contest. As in the case of Memoria, these volumes were poured into the game in portions. Thanks to this, the game was able to be debugged as part of a “soft launch”.
Moreover, the company had the opportunity to divide traffic into desktop and mobile. It made sense, since he behaved differently. If in the desktop web the game was quickly brought, as Tatiana says, “to good numbers,” then in the mobile web everything was much more complicated.
Often the game, depending on the smartphone, behaved differently in different browsers. The screen did not scale, the text did not fit into the proper frames, then nothing was launched at all. Especially often such problems occurred on the “old Chinese”.
“WORLDS: Evolution”
I had to constantly edit, test, pour into production and pour traffic. However, in a month and a half (that is, somewhere by the end of December last year), we managed to cope with all the main problems.
According to Tatiana, desktop web traffic today shows itself much better than mobile web traffic. This concerns not only the retention of users, but also their involvement, re-involvement, reactions to push.
But today OverGamez sees the problem not in the format, but in the fact that it does not yet know how to work with the mobile web the way it works with the desktop: “We understand that for success on mobile we have to adapt to the requirements of players, but it is more difficult to do this here. On the other hand, if we do it successfully, we will get a lot more, because there is a lot more traffic here.”
Now on PC on the web, the game has a retention of the first day (D1) — 28%, on smartphones and tablets on the web — 22%. Tatiana considers these to be good indicators and says that at the start, before the project was polished, retention was at the level of 15%.
The company is not ready to share specific revenue right now. At the same time, it is noted that the game today earns in the social network OK as much as strong middle-class people did on this platform eight years ago, during the heyday of the market. This is exceptionally good by today’s standards.
ARPDAU games OverGamez managed to bring up to one ruble. This is the average for the casual genre on OK. So the company is happy with “WORLDS: Evolution” today. Moreover, they are already preparing another HTML5 game for release and are not going to leave this market yet.
About the contest
A total of 120 teams participated in the Instant Games Cup last year. There were six winners, including Memoria and WORLDS: Evolution. Half of them received cash prizes (New Star nomination), another half — traffic (Pro nomination).
Alexey Kashevarov, Director of Business Development at OK, said that such a division — both by category and by type of prizes for each — reflects the complex strategy of the social network.
We wanted not only to bring existing studios to our platform or motivate them to migrate Flash projects to HTML5, but also to encourage newcomers to try themselves in the gaming industry by publishing their first games with us. Their tasks are also different. For novice developers, the start-up capital is more important in order to try something new for themselves. Game studios with successful projects need much more traffic: they have enough operating money, and the promotion of new projects can play an important role in the further success and profitability of the game.
Director of Business Development OK
OK is very pleased with the results of the competition today. The main thing is that new developers have come to the platform. In the three months that the first Instant Games Cup was held, the social network received several dozen new projects.
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Now the history of Instant Games Cup. By the end of September, the social network is holding another contest for the best HTML5 game. As a year ago, an experienced team can win up to 1 million downloads in it, and a young studio — up to 600 thousand rubles.
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