Is it possible to be delighted with the game, to consider it brilliant in places, but at the same time not to believe in its success, based on knowledge about the market, about how audiences react to certain approaches? Easily. And Mars Pop is a great example here.
In the new project, the project of the Outfit7 studio, known for the Talking Tom series, whose total downloads crossed the 1 billion mark two years ago, what is usually not accepted to interfere is mixed. I’m talking here about the ideological contradiction of the game, about the fact that Mars Pop has a conflict at its very core, in the concept, which will be discussed later.
As we have already written today, the game is a bubble completely built on synchronous PvP.
It looks like this: a player who wants to play waits for the game to pick up an available opponent (the wait rarely lasts more than 10 seconds, but sometimes you have to wait up to 40 seconds).
Then he is thrown directly into battle: on the right – his own glass, in the upper left corner – the opponent’s glass. Task: as often as possible, completely clear your glass of bubbles, thereby adding rows of bubbles to the opponent’s field. If the bubbles reach a certain point, the player loses.
Actually, this is what everything in the game is built on. And, it would seem, what’s wrong? Bubble is an accessible, uncomplicated genre, and PvP increases the motivation of its players.
The thing is that these components are synchronous PvP multiplayer and the genre chosen by the developers… They are from different universes, if you will. If we are talking about a simultaneous game against each other, then this is usually a male audience of up to 35. Casual games, which include the bubble genre, no matter how much we say that their audience is as wide as possible, first of all, women 35 plus are considered as their target, who, attention, do not like PvP in real time and in general action (in the broad sense of the word) as such.
Keeping this in mind, it’s hard to believe that the core of the casual audience will accept Mars Pop, which conceptually literally copies one of the competitive modes of “Tetris” from Electronic Arts for the social network Facebook (I’m not talking about the mobile, but about the social version of the game).
On the other hand, having the opportunity to pour cross-traffic from Talking Tom games behind your back, you understand that it will definitely not hurt to achieve high results in terms of downloads – the targeting problem will definitely not hurt the game.
Having told about what confused me in the game, I omitted those couple of moments that delighted me. The first one concerns virality, and the second one concerns monetization.
The economy of the game is based on the sale of crystals – a hard currency with which energy is replenished. That’s just the number of divisions in the “battery” is not strictly limited: it can be increased “by absolutely” by inviting friends. More precisely, every friend who downloaded the game after your invitation adds another constant division of energy to you. This is a good price for spam.
Monetization is even trickier. The fact is that you can compete with the chosen opponent an unlimited number of times, the main thing is that he wants it and has energy. And since after any defeat you want to take revenge, it is easy to understand that in the absence of energy, this desire is an excellent motivator to spend real money on currency.
What’s the point of a winner continuing to play with a loser? The fact is that for a series of victories, more points are given to the rank than for a single victory, so you can quickly gain in the ranking on weak players who want to restore justice.
A high rating is not only a place in the table, but crystals according to the results of the tournament.
In general, as you can see, the project is worth attention, there are enough interesting moments in it. Another question is whether the advantages will outweigh the cup in which the “conceptual contradiction” is located?
You can download games from the App Store here, from Google Play – here.