![]() One of the main criticisms levelled at King is that its portfolio is too similar – even amongst its four major titles, only Bubble Witch is significantly different in terms of game mechanics. It's more about the meta-game, or those areas around it where you can evolve." "There's much more room to explore in social, in how players interact, or team based games, but you don't need to make the core gameplay loop more complex. "That's often a mistake of a game designer, that they want to add more complexity to it," Knutsson warns. "There's still room to grow that category too, and a lot of ways to evolve games but not necessarily by making them more complex or advanced." "In doing our games, I think we've inspired a lot of companies to follow us and that we essentially made the casual category much bigger than it was before we entered the market," Knutsson says. "They can make a great indie game, but to make a game that stays on the top of the charts forever, that's like running a business in itself but that's how the market has evolved."īut with mobile gaming now spearheaded by a games studio backed by Activision Blizzard, is there any room for innovation in the sector, or is it permanently dominated by free-to-play match-three puzzlers aimed at the casual player? "It's not like a five-man firm does that any more," he adds. "You need to know how to work with data, you need to have a tech infrastructure that can scale and manage and collect all that data." "Apple and Google are quite happy to promote new games continuously, but today you have to be a super skilled marketeer as well as a game builder," he says. Knutsson's advice? Get good at marketing. One of the most common problems smaller mobile developers cite in growing their business is discoverability on platforms such as Google Play and the App Store. It doesn't really happen any more, like it did five, seven years ago." I think it's much harder today for independent developers to go and make a game and make that massive. The recipe for success? "It needs to be a broad enough mass appeal game, it needs to be marketable, and that bar is rising with the pressure in the market. "We're thinking about whether we should make it a permanent addition, but we want to use it as a celebratory thing right now," Knutsson says. Regular players will find them tremendously powerful, as they wipe out one entire layer of the game board, and generate further booster candies. One of those updates, live in-game now, celebrates the fifth anniversary with a new power-up called the Party Booster. King adds new content to the game weekly, and updates the back-end client at least every fortnight. ![]() It turned out for the better to be longer-lasting games."Ĭandy Crush Saga was indeed long-lasting – the game is nearing in on its 3000th level. ![]() "We've learned and developed our own business model as we went, so our own preconceptions turned out to be wrong. "We were ramping up to launch a lot of games before we realised that they seemed to be lasting," Knutsson says, adding that the team then realised they needed to build more content for Saga. King co-founder and chief creative head, Sebastian Knutsson King
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