Release of the Day: Mountain Goat Mountain

Zynga is still afloat and manages to create good games. That’s just whether it will bring the company the desired growth of stocks on the stock market is a big question.

Scolding the company of Marcus Pinkus is, let’s say, a good tone. Predicting Zynga’s imminent demise is from the same opera. Constant scandals, dismissals and reshuffles in the top management staff only add fuel to the fire of gossip.

Nevertheless, the company is still afloat and trying to keep up with market trends. Earlier this year, she already managed to release her “clash” – Empires & Allies – and “three-in-a-row” – FarmVille: Harvest Swap. Now the next step is your own reading of Crossy Road.

But here it is important not to rush to conclusions: it is not worth blaming Zynga for creating another copy. This, at a minimum, would be unfair to Mountain Goat Mountain. The similarity with Crossy Road, rather, here is still ideological in nature.

The user’s task in the game is taps and/or swipes (there are five in the game! control schemes) drive the main character as high as possible on the level, without falling under boulders and barrels, snacking on grass, and also avoiding crevices. There is no unambiguous path with obstacles peculiar to the modern reading of the classic Frogger and its clones – I’m talking about Crossy Road – here.

However, this does not prevent the game from resembling the much more complex and “independent” Down the Mountain, from which it got much more in terms of gameplay than from Crossy Road. But the latter, apparently, inspired Zynga to take a bold step for such a company.

The fact is that the new game of Pinkus and Co. is an experiment in entering a shallow backwater of free-to-play with a “human face”, one of the conditional postulates of which can be called the lack of the ability to (significantly) influence the game result with microtransactions.

The monetization of Mountain Goat Mountain is based on the acquisition of game characters, of which there are not so many at the moment – 22 pieces. Complete with each character – a mountain goat in the truest sense of the word – there is a unique world.

Don’t want to pay? It’s okay: coins are scattered abundantly on the endless game level – the mountain rushing to infinity – and once a day a chest with gold opens, which is just enough for a new ward.

Actually, that’s the whole monetization: sit, play, have fun. Given the very high production for a minimalistic game (at the FarmVille 2 level) and addictive gameplay, this is, fortunately, not difficult.

There’s just one thing. Hipster Whale earned its millions of dollars not by selling game characters, but by video advertising in the game, video advertising, which Mountain Goat Mountain does not have. Therefore, the success of this Zynga experiment is still in question.

You can download the game from the App Store here, from Google Play here. By the way, the game’s scores are both high there – a full five points on iOS, four points on Android.