On the first day of KRI 2013, a round table “The present and future of mobile games” was held, which was attended by representatives of App Annie, Flurry, Game Insight and Zeptolab.
The semi-dark hall was conducive to an intimate conversation. However, whether from the cold, or from excitement, Western analysts in the person of Guillaume Larrieu from Flurry and Justin Rapp from App Annie knocked their feet for two hours. However, perhaps it was the questions that came from the director of the publishing direction of Game Insight Artem Bocharov: how much money is on the mobile market, how big is the Russian market and so on.
The analysts did not have specific answers. They shrugged their shoulders, they say, there are no exact figures with them, and talked about already understandable things: games earn the most, the Russian market is one of the most dynamic, plus they referred to the February data that we published a couple of months ago.
Artem Bocharov, Efim Voinov, Justin Rapp, Guillaume LarrierA Million Dollar Game
When it came to how to develop a million-dollar game, the guests perked up.
Guillaume even joked that if he knew, he would have been developing his own application for a long time.
Justin, when asked about the secrets of creating a hit, at first he nodded in the direction of Efim Voinov, CTO of Zeptolab, who was sitting next to him, in the sense that “these developers should be aware of”, but the microphone broke at that moment. In the end, Justin had to answer. In his opinion, to create a successful game, it is necessary to “give people what they want.”
Yefim, who eventually borrowed the microphone from Justin, had a different suggestion: “don’t plan to make a successful game from the very beginning, find your niche and make a quality project for it.”
Artem Bocharov turned out to be sharper in his statements:
“If you want to make a hit, make a hit and don’t listen to anyone, if you want to do business, you need to build on the existing generally accepted models.”
“You shouldn’t sit and think about how to make any special game,” Justin returned to the conversation. – If you look at most modern projects, these are mixes of long-proven mechanics. So it makes sense to choose a genre that is close to you and wonder what interesting things you can do with it.”
“A good way is to look at old Atari games,” Efim said. – And try to adapt them to modern realities.”
And a little more about moneyBoth Larrier and Justin did not rule out that the price of a user in free-to-play games could jump to $10.
But in this case, according to the representative of App Annie, developers of paid applications will remain in the black. It will be too expensive and risky to develop free games.
“In turn, it’s not worth putting a price tag on your game above one dollar if you don’t have a revolutionary game with any special gameplay or don’t have a good IP,” Efim concluded.
One lineThe main thing that modern games lack is synchronous multiplayer, says Justin from App Annie.
Zeptolab has stated that it is going to move away from the concept of a one-game company. At the moment, they are just experimenting, including with free-to-play.
According to Flurry, it’s not the traffic that matters, it’s important that the game has an audience.