Christian Segerstrole: We decided to anti-monetize the game

The co—founder of Glu Mobile and PlayFish said that it is not worth looking at cash tops, and the most important thing in games is the community of players.

Kristian Segerstrale is one of the most prominent figures in the mobile games market. By the age of 37, he managed to co-found Glu Mobile and PlayFish, was an executive vice president of EA, and also helped sell 51% of Supercell to the Japanese from GungHo for $1.5 billion. Today, Christian is one of the directors of the Super Evil Megacorp studio, which develops and supports the Vainglory mobile MOBA.

Vainglory’s position in the box office tops of the iPad App Store (Russia, USA, Germany)

To date, the game has nothing to boast about in terms of downloads and revenue, which, judging by the interview that Segestrol gave to our colleagues from GamesIndustry yesterday, does not really upset him.

Moreover, a person who participated in the development of the highest-grossing mobile companies in the world condemns the “insanity” of developers on the cash top.

According to Christian, the main difference between Vainglory and other mobile free-to-play games is not that the game, on average, is played 75 minutes a day today, but that it is community-centric.

“It’s very difficult to find anything in our game that you can pay for. Literally, you have to try very, very hard to spend money in the project, we are not focused on that at all right now. In fact, from the very beginning we decided to sort of anti-monetize the game. We want hardcore fans to feel that we have chosen a path not to be exploitative free-to-play.”

Segerstrole believes that forcing a player to spend money is a dead-end way to develop games. In the future, this practice will lead to nothing, the game will not live long.

“If you, as a designer, are engaged in thinking how to squeeze money from the user, your game will not last long. I would postulate this statement as a universal truth.”

The main thing in games today, according to Christian, is working with the community. It is the support of the gaming community that will help the game stay afloat for as long as possible. Games with a strong fan base should not be afraid of the situation that is commonplace for today’s market — low visibility of projects in the store, the need to be constantly at the top of downloads in order to regularly replace outgoing, gutted players with new ones.

“This is our guiding star, we really care about our community. In January alone, we had more than 250 thousand unique views of dev streams. And we didn’t really promote them.”

Segerstrole is not afraid to spend all the money on building a community that does not spend money on the game. According to him, the team is not dispersed into several projects. Everyone is only busy with Vainglory, and everyone understands that the project is only at the very beginning of the journey. At the moment, the developers are posting updates to the game every three to four weeks, taking into account the wishes of the players. So, Christiana apparently believes that the future of the project is cloudless.

“I don’t care what the box office weeks look like this week and what they will be in a week. It’s important to me how they will look in two years. When we decided to make Vainglory two years ago, we thought that in three to five years something like this would be a hit on touch screens. Two years have passed and we understand that we have a great start. But it takes time and sometimes you just need patience.”

In addition, Finn believes that users care little about the box office performance of the game. They don’t choose games by looking at grossing. You need to look at it last if you want to understand whether the project will be successful or not. For Segerstrole, the cash top is nothing more than an indicator of which companies and games are making money at a particular moment. The box office top is unlikely to say anything about the prospects.

You can download the game from this link (iPad version). An Android version is also planned to be released in a few weeks.

A source: http://www.gamesindustry.bizAlso on the topic:

Author Vainglory – about the main lessons of the industry

• Developers of a new MOBA for “tablets” raised $15 million
• Super Evil Megacorp – positions itself as a team creating mobile games for hardcore gamers.

It employs former employees of Blizzard, Riot, Rockstar and Guerrilla Games. The team’s first product was a MOBA for tablets — Vainglory.