Interview with Renatus

Hi! Tell me about Renatus. The company appeared on the horizon relatively recently. How did it come about?

Hi! How the Renatus company took shape in the summer of 2012. The main impetus for the emergence was the interest in the market of social and mobile games from the investment company Noosphere Ventures, which is now the main investor of the company. We managed to assemble a team of people who had previously been engaged in the creation and promotion of products in other IT industries on the world market for a long time.

Is there any myth/story of how everyone got together and decided – “we need to make mobile games”?

There is no such story. There was an understanding of current market trends, the vector of development set by the managing staff of Noosphere Ventures, and, of course, the desire for something new.

Was there any specific goal at the first stage? 

The number one goal is to make the largest gaming conglomerate in Eastern Europe. The first step towards the goal is to enter the Western market with casual projects.

Why casual?

It’s easier than going straight to the midcore stage. 

Over the past two years, we have gained tremendous experience, so we look at the situation much more broadly today. To date, we have already released two midcore titles and do not plan to stop there.

Has the company started making a profit, started giving money to investors?

Investors are satisfied with the return on the project, this allows us to release 4-5 games per quarter now.

And what is your most successful project? Which game do you consider the greatest success?

Bubble Origins and Bubble Chronicles projects have performed well, the current MAU of each project is about five hundred thousand users. One of our current tasks is to gain a foothold in the midcore project market, therefore, from the perspective of prospects, we are now betting on the game Brave Tales. 

Just a week ago, it was released on Odnoklassniki. Brave Tales has been on Facebook for a long time, but we haven’t implemented everything from what we see in this game, so we haven’t actively promoted it on the world market yet. Grinding.

The second promising project is Need a Hero. I think in the near future we will be able to please the owners of iOS devices with them.

Of the midcore ones, you still have Undersky: the Eternal Saga. As far as I understand, this is a mix of butler, turn-based tactical strategy and time manager. Are you betting on this project?

It was, to a greater extent, an experimental game. Having done it, we got a good diverse experience, but I can’t say that we are betting on Undersky. The game was, rather, the preparation of the foundation for future titles, both from the point of view of the product and in terms of the technical component. 

What do you mean by the technical component here?

Developing games and quickly porting them to different platforms is a difficult technical task. You can use either third-party engines or your own developments. 

In the project Undersky: the Eternal Saga, we used our experimental cross-platform game engine. Now we have suspended work on it.

Why?

It seems to us that Unity is the future.

So you won’t be using your engine anymore?

We have gained a lot of experience. Will we use it? Time will tell. Now it needs improvement. 

To switch to your own platform, there must be an ironclad confidence that this is an advanced technology that has no analogues.

A year ago, I heard from many developers: Marmalade is a terrible tool, we’re going to Unity. Now I communicate with many developers, the situation is reversed: Unity is a black box, nothing can be changed, a bad option, we are making our own engine. What do you think?

Big companies like Ubisoft or Gameloft can afford to make a high-quality game engine on their own, or globally modify existing solutions on the market for themselves. The development and support of the engine is an expensive pleasure that requires dozens of world-class specialists. 

Another important point is the ecosystem of the market. Now Facebook is actively working with the Unity popularization company among its audience.

According to current forecasts of the platform representatives, by the end of 2014, 70% of users (the American Facebook audience) will have an installed Unity player. I do not know if they will succeed, but I can confirm that since 2012 (the release of our first prototype on Unity on Facebook), the situation has changed qualitatively for the better. 

Keep in mind: the casual audience is switching to the Unity player longer than others, people are interested in playing, and not doing complicated things, installing players, etc. Now only about 30% of causal players have a Unity player installed. 

I hope everything will change soon and the next year or two the main part of the development will switch to Unity. 

And why, as an option, not Unreal? It is also free now, if developers earn less than $50 thousand from it.

Unreal is a solution that is convenient for projects with certain specifics. As a publisher, we tend to unify technical solutions for our projects, so we chose Unity for ourselves.

Let’s move away from technical issues directly to Renatus. The company now has 11 match 3 projects, 8 of them are “money”. Why?

The Bubbles genre conquered the grossing charts much earlier than match-3. Therefore, at the first stage of the company’s formation, all resources were directed in this direction.

Now, understanding the semantics of the Bubbles market, it was decided to project their experience in the match 3 direction. In the spring you will see some of our new match 3 projects.

Many foreign companies see money and match 3 in grossing. They see and think: and we can do this too. It is clear that they, of course, cannot do such a thing. How to explain to them: everything is not so easy, there are pitfalls.

I remember an anecdote here: “$100 is not for the fact that I hit with a hammer, but $ 100 for the fact that I knew where to hit.” 

Yes, indeed, the development of a full-fledged match 3 project for an unprepared developer can be long-term and very costly.

The first stage of development is the analysis of the market you plan to enter, understanding the needs of users in this market, the specifics of their involvement in the game.

The active match 3 audience is mainly mature women. Is it easy to work with them? No. It is required to know their mentality. 

Depending on the market, the audience’s expectations of the game may change radically, which significantly affects the setting, storyline, etc.

Plus, when we release a game, our goal is to convey a certain emotional experience to users.

When you constantly win or lose, the interest in the game fades.

Regardless of the genre and positioning of the game (casual or hardcore), high-quality gameplay is a wide range of emotions, which is formed from changing the balance of the game, the quality of art, music, etc. There are dozens of nuances. Being able to channel the emotions of the audience in the right direction is a non-trivial task.

A number of surprises to the developer presents a wide range of audience expectations from the game.

Conditionally, users are divided into several groups. One of the most numerous groups of users by psychotype in match 3 is “researchers”. They are not interested in tournaments, socialization is not so important, they just want to play and see new game content. At the same time, “social workers” want to actively interact with friends in the gameplay, “achievers” stand out from the rest, etc.

The level of expectations of the audience from the game increases in proportion to the quality of the games of top developers. The release of match 3 games is an expensive pleasure, both in development and marketing, which imposes risks and high expectations from a financially interested party.

The ultimate goal of the bulk of gaming projects is to make a profit. At the same time, you need to remember that you are creating a product for users who have already played dozens of world-class games. Giving them something they will be willing to pay for is a whole art. 

If you look at the game as a technical solution, the gameplay itself is not so difficult to do. A lot of time is spent by young companies creating secondary functionality that is not directly related to gameplay, but significantly affects the final result: analytics systems, socialization, retention systems, ratings, etc.

And how long does it take for your internal teams to develop match 3?

It all depends on the scale of the project and the current material and technical base of the studio, from 4 months.

Is this a team of how many people? 11-12 people?

More.

Can’t you share the exact figure?

At Renatus, the development process is diversified. Most of the team participates in the project only for 10-20% of their time. During the entire cycle of creating a game, up to 50 people can take part in the development process. Up to 20 people work on the project fulltime (art, tech, production).

Here you mentioned that in the next quarter you are bringing out three or four match 3 projects. Aren’t they eating each other’s audience?

No. 

Why?

Because people, as a rule, play several similar games at once. For various reasons. 

I always want variety, something new, plus, games always have a unique setting, plot, balance of levels. 

It all depends on the user’s expectations at a given time, many games allow you to relax. You play and get a buzz from the game, you don’t want a challenge, you came back tired from work, immersed yourself in the game, spent an hour – rested. 

When you are determined to win, you go into those especially difficult balls, the words “now I will pass, now I will pass” flash through your head, as a result you lose, for you this is a challenge, overcoming it, you get a lot of strong emotions, but, as a rule, the gameplay itself is quite intense and after it you want to relax a little.

From the point of view of the genre, these may be the same balloons, but the user will receive a different emotional experience, this is one of the main reasons why users can simultaneously go through several bubbles projects.

The second reason is banal – you shot in one game, you ran out of energy, the game currency ran out, but you are not ready to pay yet, and you went to another game.

It turns out that traffic flows well from one match 3 to another match 3 game?

It all depends on the audience that a particular game has formed. Even in the context of one genre, the results may differ significantly. To understand the needs of our audience, we use an intelligent system that minimizes the possibility of losing an active audience.

King in its latest report stated that the decline in the company’s revenue in the 4th quarter is due to the fall of gross earnings Candy Crush Saga. What do you think? 

Each project has its own life span, for casual titles it is an order of magnitude lower than for desktop games. 

It’s normal that users’ interest in the game will fade. King has been on the game dev market for a long time, and they announced themselves to the whole world with the release of Candy Crush Saga. But they were on the web, gained tremendous experience on the game portal, where they tested and polished their projects, got an understanding of what these games should be.

With this knowledge, they entered Facebook, and then the mobile market. 

Perhaps the interest in Candy Crush is on the decline, but I think that King will competently transfer its active audience to other projects and show the whole world something completely new and exciting.  

Isn’t there a fear that the audience will soon get tired of match 3, as happened a few years ago in the casual games market?

The game development market is dynamic, but, according to our forecasts, we still have time. 

Thanks for the interview!