Do Kingdoms of Camelot and Arcane Empires compete with each other, Andrew Sheppard, president of Kabam Game Studios, told us about his fastest-growing game and a new racing project.
Andrew SheppardYou have a large number of projects similar in mechanics, whose audiences overlap (Kingdoms of Camelot, The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth, Arcane Empires).
Aren’t they pulling users away from each other? If so, why did you go for it? We conducted research in this direction both in Facebook and on the mobile market, and as a result came to the conclusion that you just need to use targeting and cross-promotion correctly when, say, the Hobbit ads are shown to players in Kingdoms of Camelot.
And, in general, at the same time, the performance of games does not suffer. So from a business point of view, there is no such problem for us.
Based on the experience of cooperation with Warner Bros., can you tell us what kind of increase in revenue the use of the franchise gives? I can’t give exact figures, but licensing undoubtedly gives an increase in income.
Here, in principle, the situation is the same as in the console games industry, where, say, the Spider-Man brand helps to sell the game not only to gamers, but also to users who are not too sophisticated in games, for example, a dad who came to the store for a new game for his son.
But in our case, in the case of digital distribution, among other things, the quality of the franchise is a very important factor, regardless of whether it is an original IP or a hyped movie brand. For example, we spent a lot of effort and money on the development of the Kingdoms of Camelot brand and “built” it for a long time. And “The Hobbit” is, of course, a megafranchise. By the way, thanks to a strong brand, you can get a lot of free traffic. But if a game under a powerful license does not satisfy users, then serious problems may arise with a partner, the owner of the franchise.
Kingdoms of Camelot – Kabam’s main hitBut it takes a lot of money to purchase a Hobbit-level license.
Is it possible to say from the first results of your game that the invested funds will “bounce back”? I can say for now that this game has already become the fastest growing among all our projects.
By the way, it is interesting that on Android The Hobbit game has gained more popularity than Kingdoms of Camelot, but on iOS the situation is reversed.
A few days ago Kabam announced a game for the sixth part of Fast and Furious (in Russia – “Fast and Furious”), and today in your report you paid quite a lot of attention to racing genre games. Does this mean that your project will also be a race. After all, you specialize mainly in strategies, and here is a new genre for you! Yes, it is.
We are very much counting on the power of the IP itself, as well as on the team from Vancouver that implements this project. It brought together the guys who worked in EA Black Box and made great games from the Need For Speed and Skate series. By the way, she already looks great now. And, as you might guess, it will be a frituplein.
The company plans to at least create a Need for Speed competitorWhat are the most important trends of this year would you note?
First of all, a further increase in the number of projects for tablets, because their penetration is going at a crazy pace.
I think smartphones have already reached their peak, and tablets still have a lot to grow.
In addition, now there is a transition period in the big industry (from the seventh to the eighth generation of consoles), which, of course, will also have an impact on the mobile games market, because games for “tablets” are much closer to console projects than games for smartphones.
What do you think about Eastern Europe and other emerging markets? Oh, we are very interested in developing these markets.
Among them, we have special hopes for Russia, Brazil and Turkey.