Report from KRI #4: Mobilization from Game Insight

The second day of KRI was held under the banner of Game Insight. As part of the game developers conference, the authors of “Natives” and “Dragons of Eternity” held their own mini-event – a four-hour seminar “Mobilization”.

A new world

We live in a new world, the world of the victorious mobile revolution. The incident is that not everyone is aware of this today. A mobile phone, a smartphone, and more recently a tablet have so rapidly and firmly entered our daily life that they are now taken for granted.

However, until recently everything was completely different. How much our lives have changed over the past eight years is shown by the picture below, with which Alice Chumachenko, the head of Game Insight, started the company’s seminar.

The difference is obviousOn the left is the square in front of the Sistine Chapel before the election of Benedict XVI in 2005.

On the right – she is the same before the election of his successor in 2013.

We really live in a completely different world.

Cross-platform and synchronization as standard

In this new world, the mobile device market is so large that, according to representatives of Flacebook, the next billion Internet users will enter the network for the first time from their “handsets”, not PCs.

The level of erudition (technical savvy) of most of them will be much to be desired. Or, as Anatoly Ropotov, executive director of Riga innoWate, mildly stated, “new players will not understand why they cannot play the same game on different platforms from the same profile, while maintaining progress.”

The studio’s latest gameSo developers in the very near future need not just to release their project on the maximum number of successful platforms (Facebook, iOS, Google Play), but also to make sure that they synchronize with each other.

It’s not easy. 

Among the problems: constant communication interruptions, conflicts with maintaining progress on different platforms, the uniqueness of the UI for each device.

Remark 1:During the seminar, Anatoly also stated that one of the Game Insight games has about half a million installations on Windows 8. According to him, the company is also satisfied with the results on Windows Phone.

Hardcore on mobile devices

Where there are a lot of users, there are a lot of developers. The problem is that, as already mentioned, most of the new users are casual. As a result, developers who want to survive in a rapidly developing market have to make games with the lowest possible entry threshold. And many, as Maxim Donskikh, vice president of Game Insight publishing, noted, develop casual projects “through force”.

Not everyone dreams of making farmsIt would seem that they are doomed to “decay and hopelessness”, to develop games that they themselves do not like.

However, there is one “but”.

Along with the growth of the total mobile audience on iOS and Android, the number of real hardcore gamers who need complex games has also grown.

Moreover, according to Maxim, the leading positions in the box office tops today belong to hardcore projects. However, he immediately clarified that he was talking about “proper hardcore”, which today is also called midcore.

Remark 2:Kabam, in turn, shares these concepts.

According to the American company, the audience of hardcore and midcore projects is seriously different.Remark 3:

Proper hardcore, from Maxim’s point of view, is a game with a deep, diverse and gradually becoming more complicated gameplay.

In addition, it should be adapted to modern mobile standards – a clear interface, social chips, virality. Plus, which is also important, a hardcore game should not only have an easy start, but also an easy “return”.Clash of Clans

So today a mobile developer has two ways to develop a business.

The first is to develop the game for the widest possible audience. To achieve significant financial results in this area, the game will need at least several million downloads. The second way is midcore. To make good money on it, according to Maxim, several tens of thousands of high-quality users are enough. In addition, in such projects, the player’s life cycle is longer, and the audience itself is more active.

Which way exactly should I choose? It’s up to the developer to decide for himself in the mobile cross-platform world.