Steampunk in mobile games

The Ukrainian studio Room 8, previously noted for the release of Cyto, is going to release Riot Runners, a runner about robots, “imbued with the spirit of steampunk.” The imminent release of the game is a great reason to talk about the popularity of steampunk on mobile platforms. 

But first, a small digression.

We were very surprised that following the results of Leonid Sirotin’s lecture on Live Mobile the day before yesterday! the main topic for discussion was the setting .

Recall that Leonid gave a pie chart “Matsanyuk’s Circle” during his speech. According to this circle, when deciding which world to choose for the game, it is necessary to understand the consequences that your choice will lead to. For example, if you choose cyberpunk / steampunk, then, most likely, you will cover only 10% of the entire audience that may potentially be interested in the project. 

This does not mean that we should refuse to use this or that world. It’s just that in other cases, the setting will not work for the game, but against it. For example, when communicating with various Western publishers, we came across the opinion that steampunk scares the casual audience. 

Anyway, recently more and more projects with steampunk elements have appeared on the App Store and Google Play. Warner Bros. not so long ago, AdvenChewers was noted as a runner, Chillingo published Steampunk Tower, and Black Pants – Symmetrain.

Heroes of Order & Chaos is, of course, fantasy, but it has steampunk elements. This train, for example

What’s it? Is it a trend or the desire of developers to popularize their favorite genre?

It’s hard to say. Anyway, the more pressing question seems to be: which audience is most open to this genre (that is, who is it)?

First thought: mobile hardcore fans, lovers of complex time managers, like Kingdoms of Camelot. But as last year’s Kabam experience showed, this is not the case. 

The fact is that in 2012, an American company launched Arcane Empires. Initially, the project was positioned somewhere at the junction of steampunk and dieselpunk: cruisers and zeppelins, plowing the skies, muskets, gears. 

Arcane Empires icon a year ago

Arcane Empires icon now

But over the year, the company has seriously changed the positioning of the game. On the screenshots of the project in the App Store, the game now looks like a standard fantasy product. What could make Kabam do this? Perhaps it is the low interest on the part of users in the setting. 

Although, if you look at the situation with Steampunk Tower, designed for, as it seems to us, a more casual audience, everything is different.

Some geeks have fun with electricity attributed to teslapank

For the purity of the experiment, we decided to compare the indicators of a number of recently released Chillingo projects with each other. As a result, it turned out that among the games “for a buck”, Steampunk Tower had one of the best indicators in the first week in terms of downloads (during the feature on the Russian market) (11th place in paid ones). But Bridgy Jones has the best indicators, which is not steampunk, but about steam locomotives (7th place in paid ones).  

This is nothing more than information for reflection, of course, it is impossible to judge trends from Chillingo games.  

So, unfortunately, it is difficult to answer the question about the steampunk audience.

The low popularity (including in comparison with cyberpunk) of this genre can be explained, as it seems to us, by the absence of a central cultural phenomenon forming or popularizing this genre. This is a purely stylistic direction, which is often confused with dieselpunk, in the formation of which as a genre the picture “The Heavenly Captain and the World of the Future” played an important role. 

Steampunk has no such phenomenon. They often try to attribute the works of classics (Jules Verne, H. G. Wells) to it, but they were written long before the concept itself, formed in the wake of the popularity of cyberpunk. 

In addition, steampunk has no ideological content, no central themes. If cyberpunk arose on the wave of fear of the future, of the world of corporations, digital technologies and human alienation (which makes it related to the late noir, which exploited the paranoid fear of American society before the nuclear threat, as exemplified by Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me to Death 1955), then steampunk is, at most, imaginary nostalgia for Victorian England.

We can say that this stylistic trend is still waiting for a noticeable cultural phenomenon, and therefore it is in a kind of ghetto. By the way, before the appearance of the game Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick in 2001, it was impossible to talk about this. Such things.

In the near future, only Riot Runners is planned on steampunk mobile platforms, which Room 8 positions as a midcore project with appropriately midcore gameplay. However, in the latter case, steampunk (interspersed with dieselpunk), rather, became the starting point for finding your own style, which also reads Limbo and Badland. When launched in Canada and Germany, it was featured by Apple. And the other day he received the Best Game In Show Audience Choice at the Indie Prize Award 2013 Kiev.

If we talk about mobile projects made in pure steampunk, then nothing has been heard about them yet. 

We are waiting for your comments and thoughts about steampunk!

Photo charts: https://www.facebook.com/mcsim