While Japanese developers are trying to bring butlers to a new level, and Americans are launching them under popular Western brands, Storm8 decided to experiment with a Puzzle & Dragons clone.
The situation in the butler market is now unique. On the one hand, they continue to earn fantastic sums in the Asian markets, and the number of their users is growing by leaps and bounds (the audience of Quiz RPG from Colopl has grown from 8 to 14 million in a month). At the same time, market leaders are trying to develop the genre. Their goal is to make another evolutionary leap in the genre.
A little over a year ago, such a leap was made by GungHo, which diluted the butler with match-3 mechanics. Up to this point, DeNA was the market leader with its flagship Rage of Bahamut. Today, against the background of a huge number of Puzzle & Dragons clones, it is quite understandable that a number of companies want to make another breakthrough, move the genre to a new level.
At the same time, Western players became more active. The box office success of Marvel War of Heroes made it clear that the eastern mechanics works perfectly in other markets if regional brands are taken into account. Thanks to this, projects such as Heroes of Dragon Age and Avengers: Alliance became possible.
As for the Western games, which literally repeated the eastern projects of two years ago, so far none of them have been among the leaders. For example, the hard-hit War of Fallen from Zynga has been unable to break out of the box office hundred even in Europe for nine months.
Against this background, the Storm8 initiative looks interesting, which, as part of the opening of a new publishing house under the FireMocha brand, announced the reissue in the Western market of the Puzzle & Dragons clone – Tower of Saviors, whose worldwide release took place almost a year ago. Then the direct developer of the game, the Hong Kong studio Mad Head Limited, acted as a publisher.
The team’s strategy was as follows: while Puzzle & Dragons collects the “cream” from the Japanese, Korean and American markets, to occupy its niche in all other regions. Since its launch in January 2013, the game has collected about 8 million downloads, but it has not become a box office hit.
After that, most likely, conversations began about the need to work in conjunction with someone who understands Western markets better. And it is not surprising that Mad Head Limited turned its attention to Storm8, which became famous for hardcore World War and iMobsters on the mobile market, and is now developing clones of box office hits.
Storm8 slightly changed the design of the project to “Western standards”, corrected monetization and released it under the War of Dragons brand. Whether this option will work is still difficult to say. So far, the new version has been launched only in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The game is not in the tops yet.
And how do you invent, does this approach make sense? Or what did not go with 8 million installations, will not go with edits and with traffic by 50 million?
A source: http://www.storm8.com