Games
A billion downloads isn't cool. A billion paying players though? That's the Holy Grail of gaming.
The best games are the ones with the simplest concepts - they’re just the hardest to master. Tetris, Bejeweled, Super Hexagon: all easy to explain, but tougher than old boots to do well in.
In today’s App Store world though, that presents a problem of its own: it’s all very well coming up with a simple, exciting game, but how do you get people to stay and keep playing when there are so many to choose from? Disney’s mobile gaming boss, Bart Decrem, is all too conscious of this. The brains behind Disney’s hit Where’s My Water? series of puzzle games, it’s up to him to figure out how to keep on competing against the latest flashes in the pan on the iPhone, month after month, year after year.
“Right now for example there’s a game that a lot of my friends are playing called Dots - it has no character or story or framework of any sort around it other than leaderboards against your friends,” he says.
“It’s a very exciting environment, but very challenging place to build a business and to build a franchise because it is such a consumable culture right? People love downloading new things, trying out fresh new experiences, there’s a lot of stuff you can get for free without having to ever pay anything, and so building a community and engaging them and building a business over time - you know, it’s an ongoing adventure.”
Of course, it helps if you have the winning formula in the first place. Where’s My Water?, which revolves around adorable crocodile Swampy and his quest to get clean (by diverting water through pipes to reach his bathtub), draws more than a few comparisons to hit games like Angry Birds and Cut The Rope, but its physics gameplay and distinct animation style are all its own.
Since the game first launched on iPhone in September 2011, it’s expanded to other platforms including Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry mobiles, as well as desktop computers, racking up nearly 200 million downloads along the way. On iPad, it’s the biggest paid game series after Angry Birds of all time.
Decrem, who became general manager of Disney Mobile Games in 2010 after the entertainment giant acquired his company Tapulous (the studio behind the hit Tap Tap series of music games), says that the trick to long running success on a platform like the App Store is to treat a game like a franchise, one that you’re constantly iterating on - and licensing out too.
“What we did with Where’s My Water? was try to think of it as a franchise - how do we keep investing here in view of what has made the game successful?” he says.
So as well as new levels, which are added all the time (500 and counting at the time of writing), there’s Where’s My Water? merchandise, and a TV series, which has garnered 100 million views online and been renewed for a second series. There’s even been a series of spin-offs, including Where’s My Perry?, starring another Disney star, a crime fighting platypus (Don’t ask). Not bad for an entirely new Disney IP created just for mobile.
Decrem says that there are two ways the team of a dozen developers (“I have a conviction that smaller teams are actually better” evolves the game. At a creative level, everything works on old fashioned gut instinct.
“We do have a philosophy: the core creative choices about ‘This is what you do with your finger’ ‘This is who Swampy is’- they are made by conviction, purely by the team and artists right?”
Then the data comes in. What’s obvious to someone isn’t to somebody else, so when your game is played by hundreds of millions of people, you need to make sure a level is actually possible to complete.
“Building a puzzle that’s fun and interesting for everyone is really challenging. I dare you to go to a toy store and find a puzzle for a seven year old and you, it’s really difficult.”
So they test on users, and they test again. “We then monitor user engagement...every now and then a level is too hard, the users drop off and stop playing, and we go back to that level and tweak it and update it.”Yep, they even use spreadsheets to work out if a level isn’t fun enough - it sounds dry, but it makes sense when so many players are at stake.
Decrem made headlines last year when he predicted that a mobile game would reach a billion downloads - since then, at least one title, Rovio’s Angry Birds, has managed that. Mobile gaming changes fast though, and Decrem now says he sees another milestone beyond that.
“That’s a fantastic accomplishment, but I think if you wanted to be critical about the milestone, it’s a bit of a vanity metric. Downloading an app is a very imperfect proxy for engagement.”
That’s especially true when so many games are free to download. Now, he says, the goal is a mobile game that makes a billion dollars.
“The first milestone was a billion downloads, the next milestone is a billion dollars.” Name checking a few free-to-play sensations like Candy Crush Saga and Clash Of Clans, he says it’ll happen soon.
“When is it that mobile games bring in revenues that are on the same scale as a successful TV property or a movie property? There’s a couple of games that are trending in that direction, those are games now are producing, call it $100m [£64m] a year in revenue. I would bet that 18 months out, there will be a game that gets more than $1bn [£640bn] over its lifetime that is a smartphone game.”
Decrem is confident that Where’s My Water? will still be going strong that far down the line (“Franchises have staying power on the App Store), and in the race for that next major milestone. If anything though, it won’t be other games that Decrem and his team will be competing with - just everything else that vies for your time.
“One of the interesting thats happened on mobile is that gaming really has no rival as a category on the App Store in terms of minute spent,”he says. “But if you look at the latest reports you’ll see the social networking category - people are spending as much time now there as they are in games.”
He lists Facebook, TV, even Tumblr, as the new competitors. “At the end of the day we’re looking for attention.”If a small group of developers can keep getting that with one game for almost two years, they must be doing something right.