Even before the release of Rage of Bahamut, Cygames studio was confident in the success of the project on the market, but they, like many others, did not even guess about its future scale, underestimated the mechanics of collectible card mobile games. What is its secret, read below.
A year ago, when Rage of Bahamut just appeared on virtual storefronts, hardly anyone could have imagined that the game would become the main box office hit of Google Play in 2012, and at the same time provoke an increase in interest in collectible card games.
MARVEL War of Heroes is made by the same team as Rage of Bahamut only specifically for the American marketFor reference, Rage of Bahamut is still in the American box office top ten iPhone apps.
In the top five box office Google Play applications, four games are collectible: the same Rage of Bahamut, MARVEL War of Heroes, Blood Brothers (RPG) and Dark Summoner.
“Collectible games are an elegant solution in terms of game design,” Doug Scott, vice president of marketing and revenue at Ngmoco, comments on the situation in an interview with Gamasutra.
According to Scott, such games include many other mechanics: a set of resources, competitions with friends, pumping virtual skills. Thanks to this, card projects find a wide response from players.
The creators of Tower of Saviors decided to experiment, they complicated the combat part of a traditional collectible game with an unconventional match3Vice-president of the American division of GREE, Eiji Araki, sees the reason for popularity in another: “this genre plays on the passion for collecting.”
Araki also highlights the following important feature of the genre: many players enjoy getting a new or especially rare card into the deck. This makes the gameplay of such games more addictive.
“The social elements embedded in the game mechanics are another reason for the popularity of collectible projects.” Users can fight with each other, buy and sell rare cards among themselves, join clans and guilds.
Dragon Collection is older than Rage of Bahamut, but not nearly as popularKimihiro Horiuchi, director of one of Konami’s game studios in San Francisco, explains the success of card games with their service model: “We launched Dragon Collection two years ago, and we continue to make changes to our game by carefully studying user behavior.
And we are sure that users continue to return to the game as we continue to work on it.”
The popularity of the genre outside Japan, where it could well be explained by cultural and social reasons, should be sought in its flexibility. A collectible game can be about anything, about baseball players, transformers, goblins, flying zeppelins and schoolgirls. Accordingly, the audience can be almost any.
This, as well as ARPU, which exceeds the same indicator for any other genre, in turn, ensure the wide popularity of the genre among developers and publishers of collectible games.
Araki from GREE is sure that such projects have the opportunity to become something more than mobile entertainment, perhaps a full-fledged hobby.