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How Game of War makes more than $1M a day

P

Purple Cheeto

Member
From Bloomberg.

Pull quotes:

“Culturally, it’s shocking to people,” Leydon says. “They say it’s just an app game. They don’t understand the scale of what’s happening here in the industry, because it’s kind of a sea change.” Indeed, those who play primarily on their phones make up 29 percent of the overall gaming audience, more than three times the size of the group that are considered hard-core console gamers, according to a marketing study released last spring by the NPD Group. Console and software sales, meanwhile, have dropped every year since 2008, says Michael Pachter, a gaming analyst at Wedbush Securities. In Leydon’s view, Upton vs. Neeson was just the first bout. “Next Super Bowl,” he says, “you might see 10 ads.”
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America’s Army was a stripped-down shoot’em-up adaptation of software the U.S. Army had been marketing as a recruitment tool. Leydon spent a year and a half developing it for arcade-game maker Global VR. Shortly before he was done, YouTube’s founders sold their company for $1.65 billion. “It was amazing,” he says, shaking his head. “Two young guys. They worked on it for, like, a year and a half. I was like, ‘That’s engineering, and what I’m doing is engineering. What’s the difference between what I’m doing and what they’re doing?’”
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Leydon recognized then that the future of mobile games wasn’t with fancy console-style graphics. “People were trying to put console games on the iPhone,” he says. “But it’s different. If your game’s just about graphics, it’s not going to work.” Smartphones, he realized, commandeer short bursts of attention; some people check their phones a hundred times a day. “They’re looking for something to do. They’re trying to fill time. And they’re jumping from app to app.” A successful game needed to require players to make quick decisions and then not be able to resist coming back umpteen times to check on the consequences of those decisions.
Click to expand...

“People look at ads and top grosses, and they don’t look at what Game of War really is,” Leydon says. “This is the largest real-time concurrent interactive application ever built. There’s nothing even close to it.”
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The average player, Leydon says, plays for two hours per day, in 12-minute sessions, 10 a day.
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“I look at Game of War as a scale niche product,” says Leydon. “I don’t need to have everybody on the earth like it. I just need to make it for the people that do like it. That’s just a free-to-play rule, because only 3 percent of the people actually pay to play, and just quadruple that even stay around.” That means that of the tens of thousands of new downloads Game of War got on Super Bowl Sunday, Leydon only needs a few thousand players to become paying customers. “Arcade games were good training,” Leydon says. “You had to make something that made people want to keep going. Not even to pay, but to keep going again and again and again. That’s the challenge, and not many people are good at it.”
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“We’re a technology company,” he says. “We’re not really a game company. What we accomplished here is actually where we’re going next. Getting so many devices to participate in the same experience at the same time—that’s going to be the most important part of the business.”
Click to expand...
 
T

The Shogun

Banned
rsz_screen_shot_2014-12-26_at_193416.jpg
 
J

JDizzv

Member
I get through reading the OP on mobile and scroll down only to find a Game of War and Kate Upton ad staring me right in the face. The irony lol...

Times are definitely changing in mobile gaming
 
Lashley

Lashley

Why does he wear the mask!?
Great article.

Never played the game but fair play to them. Wish I was making 10% of that a day.
 
D

Deleted member 47027

Unconfirmed Member
This game was huge before they bought Kate Upton.

Pretty great stats, they're putting "gaming" time and focusing it on areas that you don't get to sit down and enjoy games for. You can game all the time now. Great app, great game.
 
H

Hylian7

Member
“We’re a technology company,” he says. “We’re not really a game company. What we accomplished here is actually where we’re going next. Getting so many devices to participate in the same experience at the same time—that’s going to be the most important part of the business.”
Click to expand...

The fact that this is what is driving our industry now scares the everliving shit out of me.

Also I work at a mobile game developer that actually is a game developer.
 
7

7DollarHagane

Banned
This stuff is so gross and unappealing.

It can make a billion dollars a day and I still don't care about it. Its all garbage time wasting brainless crap.
 
D

Deleted member 47027

Unconfirmed Member
BluePumpkin7 said:
Isn't Clash of Clans much bigger or am I under a rock?
Click to expand...

It is bigger and is continuing its run. Came out in mid-2012. approaching 3 years of dominance, big money every day. This is the way to make money making games.
 
P

Papercuts

fired zero bullets in the orphanage.
I legitimately don't think I've ever seen a game advertised so aggressively. I see kate upton titties literally everywhere.
 
T

The Shogun

Banned
What is interesting though is how much certain segments of the media really want to paint mobile gaming as this gigantic, profits everywhere funhouse. While that is true, somewhat, it also is really false as well.

All you have to do is follow stocks for the mobile giants. They soar and crash hard on a pretty regular basis. The mobile space is highly highly volatile and a company that's making bank hand over fist right now, could be crashing in as little as 6 months.

Overall, despite the claims of some, core gaming has nothing to fear whatsoever from the rise of the mobile gaming market. Its actually a good thing games are selling like crazy on these devices but its a totally separate market for the most part.
 
F

fedexpeon

Banned
I don't understand how people even play these type of games.
It is just a grindfest with painted-on graphic.
Heck, these type of games remind me of that shitty mini-game from Bravely Default.
72hrs with 1 worker to build a shop? Yeah okay...
 
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