How Clash of Clans influenced the mobile gaming industry: expert opinion

August 2 marked two years since the worldwide release of Clash of Clans. Apple also marked this date with a special feature. In turn, we asked market experts about how, in their opinion, the project has influenced the modern look of the mobile games market.

Viktor Zakharchenko, Executive Director of KamaGames Studio

In my opinion, the release of Clash of Clans and its subsequent success have determined two very relevant trends at the moment.

Firstly, the investment market has again become more warm towards the mobile and social gaming industry. It "thawed", one might say, after the failure of Zynga on the stock exchange and the withdrawal of Pinkus from the number of preferred partners of Facebook.

This has led to serious financial injections into the industry: today, takeover deals are going one after another, and attracting new rounds is striking in high-profile numbers. Alibaba's latest investment in Kabam is a good confirmation of this.

The second trend: "flares" clearly marked the vector of "growing up" of mobile players. Any segment of new users goes through evolutionary stages. The first of them, which can be safely called the "Angry Birds Era", was dominated by simple, "cubically casual" timekillers. Clash of Clans can be considered a vivid representative of the second evolutionary stage. The increased "complexity" of the entry still does not reach the level of, for example, browsers, but already clearly counts on higher knowledge of the player. The games become more difficult, the player becomes more "experienced" and more selective. This is an evolutionary process that must be accompanied by living examples. "Flares" became just such an example.

Pavel Ryakkonen, CEO and Co-founder of Nevosoft

I would like to highlight three key points.

Firstly, Clash of Clans, in fact, opened such a class of games as midcore. We define it today as a combination of simple/casual mechanics with a hardcore body kit. In the case of Clash of Clans, the farm and RTS merged. Then the rest of the developers have already started mixing. GungHo, for example, took the "three-in-a-row" gameplay as the root, and then "hung" card management on it.

Secondly, Clash of Clans was one of the first games to demonstrate the financial potential of the mobile market. Yes, other projects earned millions of dollars on the App Store and Google Play before her, but not millions of dollars a day.

Thirdly, the game, perhaps, was a breakthrough in the industry, gave rise to the development of previously laid ideas.

Valentin Merzlikin, Head of Creative Mobile Developer Engagement

So we ask ourselves, what has Clash of Clans taught the industry? Or maybe you should ask yourself: what did he teach his players, ordinary users?

That the game can be violent, that the game can be funny, that the game can be beautiful. That we can make mistakes, and that we can learn. Clash of Clans shows us that life consists of routine things, and you can't just get a “fan”, but you have to work hard and do a lot of boring things (or just pay to avoid them). The game teaches us patience. The game suggests to us that you can simply change the setting, change the projection, add another story, be the first to charge the game on Android, tear everyone up, gather a normal audience and earn a lot of money. Yes, this is the moment when an ordinary user suddenly discovers that he has become a successful game developer.

Vitaly Onishchenko, co-founder and night elf of the 85th level of Playfo company

Supercell has set a very high bar for all mobile game developers. It is very difficult to get close to this bar, and even more so to jump over it.

The success of Clash of Clans is the result of a combination of several factors — an experienced team, the right products and massive marketing.

Denis Voikhansky, Head of Alis Games

When Clash of Clans first appeared, many perceived it as a simplified Galaxy Life (a social game for Facebook from Digital Chocolate).

But, for example, in Galaxy Life, the choice of PvP rivals was made "in the style" of Traviana (there is a galaxy map, you need to poke at one of the planets to attack), and in Clash of Clans, the search for an opponent is reduced to one click. Also, compared to Galaxy Life, Clash of Clans has almost no PvE and plot, but it is a very simple tutorial. And, of course, there is a very interesting setting in "clashes": it is not as childish as Galaxy Life, but still cartoon-like, suitable for a wide audience, but at least not repulsive to hardcore fans.

The funny thing is that there was every reason to perceive it as a simplified Galaxy Life. Some of the Supercell employees, including Ilkka Paananen, come from Digital Chocolate. Yes, they left the company long before the release of Galaxy Life, but who knows, they may have participated in its development. And their version turned out to be much more successful than the original, which was very successful on Facebook in 2011.

As for the impact, in my opinion, the success of the Supercell project led to the emergence of a new genre, which today is called Clash of Clans by the "bourgeoisie".

Here, by the way, you can draw an analogy with King and its Saga series of projects. Only if the British revolution was that they were the first to show that casual players actually need a challenge, then Supercell c Clash of Clans created a midcore type of games. It seems to me that no one has ever managed to create a very successful mass product with a low entry threshold, but very deep and hardcore inside.

Personally, I still don't understand how Clash of Clans can work at all, because it is, in fact, a PvP project, and PvP is not interesting to the vast majority of the mass audience. At the same time, Clash of Clans, unlike the Saga series, earns not only on "whales", which is very cool.

As often happens, only Supercell itself was able to move the Clash of Clans genre further by releasing Boom Beach. All the other countless Clash of Clones failed to bring anything really new to the genre. The same situation was with Angry Brids, Cut The Rope and other hits.

The success of Supercell is also extremely important for the industry because it shows everyone, including third-party investors, that a small group of very right people in good conditions are able to create an extremely successful mobile game and build a very expensive company from scratch quite quickly.