The key argument is over whether many of the most successful F2P mobile games are little more than money-sucking "monetisation machines", where the design is almost entirely geared towards forcing players to spend money. Supercell's rise has been interwoven with the explosion in free-to-play (F2P) games on smartphones and tablets: a trend that's caused plenty of tension within the games industry. Supercell's Hay Day game Free-to-play gaming "It's also been exciting for me personally to see how global this business has become: we've been at the top spots in Western countries, but also number two in China, and in the top five in Japan. "Our growth speaks a lot about the platform that we're on, and how quickly games can spread organically," says Paananen. It never quite took off, but one year and a "tablet-first" pivot later, Hay Day and Clash of Clans launched. Yet it was making them at a time when the dominant mobile games stores were those run by mobile operators, where quirky, characterful own-IP games tended to sell badly – if they were stocked at all.ĭigital Chocolate had some success on iOS and then Facebook, but Paananen left in 2010, then launched Supercell in 2011 to make social games on Facebook, starting with a game named Gunshine. Finnish studio Sumea, which was bought by US publisher Digital Chocolate in 2004, specialised in quirky, characterful own-IP games of the kind that would later prosper on Apple's App Store. It's a far cry from his previous mobile games companies. None of us could have imagined how quickly this would happen," says Ilkka Paananen, Supercell's chief executive. By mid-April 2013, Supercell was pulling in $2.4m of daily revenues from its 8.5m daily active players, and raising a $130m funding round that valued the company at $770m. Hay Day was released on 21 June 2012, then Clash of Clans on 2 August. The rise of Supercell in particular has been meteoric. On one level, Supercell and GungHo are rivals, but they're also partners, which should be causing the odd headache within big games companies from EA and Activision to Zynga. Now these two companies are working together, with a cross-promotional campaign with Clash of Clans characters appearing in Puzzle & Dragons, and potentially a reciprocal arrangement within Supercell's game.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |