This year we decided not to make a selection of the best games. There were many excellent projects, it was an ignoble thing to choose among them. But at the same time, in the outgoing year there were enough games that can be safely called, if not pivotal, then very important for the industry, which literally changed it before our eyes. Let’s talk about them.
Flappy BirdOne of the key projects of 2014, which was released at the beginning of 2013
What caused the success of the project is still not clear. There is an opinion that it’s all about bots, there is a version that the author of the game found a vulnerability in the App Store, which he used, and there is also one according to which the rate button was next to the retry button.
However, our Western colleagues from Mashable, having raised the base of 68 thousand reviews extracted from iTunes, did not find any signs of cheating or manipulation at the initial stage. If you track the activity of players in Flappy Bird via Twitter, you can see how, since November 2013, interest in the game has been growing rapidly in a natural way. At the same time, the first photos of American students massively playing Nguyen’s project belong to this time.
Anyway, today it doesn’t matter how exactly the project blew up the tops, for the industry the January success of Flappy Bird is a definite milestone. The game has become for many a symbol of what a project of a previously unknown developer can achieve.
In addition, Flappy Bird made it clear to the industry that complex games can be successful with a wide audience.
Threes!Today, if you start a conversation with one or another Western developer about 2048, then he or she will most likely make a sour expression on his face and say that, de, let’s better talk about Threes!, and not about her clone.
But here’s the catch, the mechanics of Threes would become! so popular, if it hadn’t been simplified first by the guys from Veewo Games, releasing 1024, which was then copied by Gabriel Cirulli (Gabriele Cirulli)?
Anyway, Threes! as a phenomenon (in the sense, with all derivatives), it turned out to be another virus of this year, forcing many developers to work in a similar direction at least (at least 600 clones of 2048 can be found in the App Store alone).
Monument ValleyThe main “indie” of the year was made by a company that has about 200 employees and specializes in the development of applications and interfaces to order, made without much hope of success, as, let’s say, an experiment (such an approach, however, did not prevent ustwo from approaching the matter as seriously as possible and starting to more or less aggressively promote the game in three months before the release).
For us, in turn, the “bell” rang: successful mobile companies, for which games (at least similar games) are a non-core business, may well experiment successfully, pursuing not commercial, but creative goals. It is quite possible that over time such things will happen more often.
Kim Kardashian: HollywoodThe fact that working with major brands can increase the project’s performance was known even before the release of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, but Glu, restarting, in fact, last year’s Stardom: Hollywood with Kim in the title role, demonstrated what happens in the case of synergy of a loud IP and proven mechanics focused on the audience, which is also potential IP audience.
Previously, this was done at such a high level only by Kabam, Warner Bros. and Disney, which are not distinguished by openness. Glu, being, in turn, a public company, could not help but tell about the successes, which, in the end, only “added fuel to the fire.” For this reason, we do not exclude that next year we will have a huge number of projects “based on” various shows.
HearthstoneThe appearance of Hearthstone on mobile platforms, firstly, once again highlighted the relevance of the multiplatform trend.
In short, it is characterized today not by the presence of games on all mobile platforms (this is something self-evident), but by the widespread practice of creating games with calculations on PC and mobile at once (where PC is not social, but electronic retail, like Steam).
Secondly, the game has demonstrated the high potential of free-to-play 2.0 on mobile platforms. The latter, we recall, marks the rejection of template game mechanics, hard pay-to-win and an increase in the role of user skills.