In the domestic and even Asian markets, RPG is the category with the largest market share and is also the most familiar to domestic developers. However, in the European and American markets, domestic and even Asian RPGs have few big successes.
According to industry data, the European and American RPG mobile game market size of 4.7 billion US dollars, of which the best performance is the "RAID Shadow Legends" released by Prarium. When it comes to this game, in fact, it not only performed well overseas, but also "raided" the Chinese and even Asian markets, once entering the domestic iOS best-selling list Top 50 and free list Top 30.
So, how exactly does this RPG do it? What are the trends in turn-based RPG mobile games? Recently, GameRefinery connected with Nicholas Day, vice president of creativity at Prarium, to talk in detail about the game and the company's more R&D and operational strategies.
Here's the full content of GameLook compiled GameRefinery:
Meta trends for moderate and casual games
GameRefinery: First of all, meta trends are a very broad topic, depending on what angle we look at, but if we just look at the trends that we have seen, the market has different upgrades in different categories, especially in the medium game category, such as RPGs.
There are not many new products on the market, and from the core gameplay level, especially the head, there is no particularly big change. If there is a bright spot, then "Gingerbread Man Kingdom" is a more eye-catching product in the RPG category last year. But it is still an RPG for character collection gameplay, and the core gameplay is familiar overall, but it also brings something new to the RPG core system, adding base building gameplay on top of character collection. In a sense, we see some elements of urban strategy games and add them to the RPG experience.
What is more interesting is that if you look at the medium strategy game market, many SLGs have long emphasized RPG gameplay or mechanics, and attach great importance to character functions, such as "State of Survival" attaches great importance to RPG mode and character growth. Last year, Puzzles & Survival was one of the few new games to make it into the best-seller list top 200, and the game's use of SLG gameplay and puzzle RPGs is a trend worth paying attention to in medium games.
Looking at the leisure field, ultra-casual games have gradually added more meta elements, more and more products have begun to embrace the "mixed leisure" model, using in-app purchases and IAA mixed monetization mode, these ultra-casual game core gameplay is very conducive to marketing, and the meta gameplay that has been added has enhanced the possibility of long-term retention and monetization.
The more classic examples are Bow and Arrow, Art of War, and Mr Autofire, and we can all see RPG elements. If you look at recent trends, especially at the head of the market, you can see that multiple puzzle games are beginning to adopt this strategy. One of the biggest hits last year was probably Zen Match released by Good Job Games, which is essentially a card mahjong game with a very simple core gameplay, but on top of that adds decorative gameplay as a progression system, but it's a little lighter than many casual games. Such a combination of gameplay can attract a larger number of users, and now the game is within the TOP 100 of the US best-selling list.
Lion Studios' Match 3D uses a similar strategy, and the gameplay is simple, you combine two similar items in a large number of items for a limited time. However, the game also added a heavier social element, adding a guild system and tournament tour activities at the beginning, which not only became the meta element of the game, but also became the actual means of monetization.
If we compare the two games with last year's most eye-catching match-3 game "Royal Match", we can find that the latter almost integrates all the elements mentioned above, it has a "Zen Match"-style progression system, adding a social framework and activity system like "Match 3D", and now, "Royal Match" has become the top two in the American match-3 mobile game category, becoming the biggest dark horse last year.
Collect gameplay trends
The last thing I want to highlight is the collectible gameplay and collectible elements in these games, especially in board games and slots games. In the past year, especially in the post-IDFA era, many old games, especially board games, are niche games for chess or slots loyal players, and new products are difficult to break through. How do you keep players in the game after a lot of head games have been added to the collection system over the past two years? Basically, these systems just add to the season, and then you provide various items for the player to collect.
As these collections are completed, players can be rewarded. This design doesn't necessarily affect gameplay, but it gives players a sense of progress each season, rather than just allowing players to consume or spin slots. Borrowing interesting features from more categories is a very good innovation, and this trend of category integration will continue.
Nicholas Day：
Plarium is a subsidiary of Aristocrat and has been acquired for many years, so we are part of the same parent company as Big Fish Games, and we started out (in 2009) as casual games, mainly social games and Facebook games, and probably a lot of young people don't know that history. At the end of the social game period, we released a number of strategy games, mainly on the Russian-language network or in the former CIS region.
Subsequently, we released Total Domination on Facebook in 2011, and then we built an empire of strategy games, each with different settings, categories, and sub-categories, such as Stormfall, Age of War, Soliders, Inc," "Total Domination," and Sparta: War of Empires. These games have performed very well on the Facebook platform, not only making us profitable, but also having enough money to do different game categories, and also allowing us to start exploring mobile platforms.
Our first mobile game hit was Vikings: War of Clans, developed by our Kransnodar studio, and now has a good performance and a lot of players. Then we started to transition to mobile games, we became mobile game-based companies, we started to expand into the casual, action games and RPG game space, we released a large number of games, the most successful is Raid: Shadow Legends, which you may have seen on some advertising platforms.
The game has actually been released for several years, and we're approaching our third anniversary, with the release of the 5v5 shooter Mech Arena in the summer of 2021, both of which are our flagship games today.
Subsequently, we developed a lot of weird things and are now doing more strategy games and more casual games. I forgot to mention Lost Island, which is probably our biggest casual game, but Raid is our most successful product.
Lessons learned from previous projects
GameRefinery: I think it's always been a very interesting trend in game development, and not long ago, someone said, "If you're good at one category, go the extra mile and do something else." "Is that so?
Nicholas Day: That's right. One, you're tired of one category, and it's tiring if you tell us to make another strategy game. We love strategy games, but we also want to try different things with our wings outstretched. Also, we're a big company with multiple studios, so each studio can try something different. We also work with sister studios, for example, the one I worked with the most was the studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where we had 600 people, because we had experience scattered in different studios, and we could tilt towards more studios. If we start doing new categories, usually not from scratch, we ask, "What's best for you?" What do you think won't work in this project? "We can learn a lot from previous projects.
Raid: Legend of Shadow
GameRefinery: Raid: Legends of Shadow is a classic turn-based RPG with very good graphics and a simple experience that makes it easy for users to understand the gameplay. In fact, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, Marvel Commando, etc. are all RPG games that have performed well in the European and American markets, Nicholas, I don't know how much you can talk about, obviously, this is currently a growing category.
NIcholas Day: Yes, some people have even said, "This project is dead", how many years has Summons been released? Marvel Commando was also a success, and Star Wars: Legend of the Galactic Heroes was a hit at the time. I think it's weird sometimes in the market, when we came into the market, a lot of people thought that "turn-based RPGs have no room for growth", and I think that's very true, when we did Raid, there were a lot of Asian turn-based RPG products on the market.
We're very engaged, "We're going to make a turn-based RPG mobile game for Diablo 3 fans," or, "If you like Dragon Age Trial and don't like cartoon characters, that's what we're going to do." It was almost like a trap at the time, because the category was very niche, there was no broad appeal, we were a little nervous, and even though we did the project, someone still said, "I want it to have users, I want them to like the game."
GameRefinery: Yes, I have to say, this is indeed a niche category, but the hero team in the game is so unique, the fans talk about the same thing, if you look at the mobile game market as a whole, few games can get so hot, even now, this game is still very attractive.
Nicholas Day: Yeah, people who like it love the game very much, like our art and curatorial team, we've tried other iterations, maybe we're going to be a little lighter, and we're not going to do that yet, I think it's better for now.
It's actually the first game that our game director really has full possession of, who used to be the art director and came from the field of visual design. The team he built and the passion behind it was a guiding light for the development of this game.
How do you balance more and more roles?
GameRefinery: What I think is more interesting is that the game is getting deeper and deeper, like the faction system, there are 10-12 factions in the game, and more new heroes are constantly appearing, which is a good retention mechanism. You've released so much stuff that there's going to be a lot of content for newbies, are you nervous about doing so, after all, it's going to make the expectations for the next content higher?
Nicholas Day: Frankly, we're not sure if these heroes are enough, because that's the tradition of RPGs, like how many heroes does Call the Magic have? We did four times more content than they did, and even when we started, we mentioned that we didn't need 1200 heroes because it would make too much content, and we went on.
Now that we've launched 700 heroes in some markets, we don't think 300 characters are enough, we think players are consuming very fast, and now we're facing tough decisions every time we add new heroes, and our production progress is very tight because the more you add, the better the feedback from the players. Finding a balance between this, it is feasible to continue to add heroes, each hero has a unique character, they have enough room in the game, of course, this is also an ongoing challenge.
GameRefinery: In Raid games, if you're lucky enough to reach multiple of the same legendary heroes and rise to the top, you'll have more advantages later in the game. Many of the best team settings are continuous, and some combinations complete levels quickly. However, legendary heroes themselves are hard to come by, not to mention having two of the same legendary cards, which is especially good for big R.
Nicholas Day: Yeah, it also requires us to keep changing the game late, because in the long run, you're talking about worse situations. What we're doing behind our back is, what's the next progression level? How do we give more options for gameplay, because in the end, players will rank higher and you have to do higher challenges.
Sometimes we can think about these issues later, but we always feel that there is enough content, we have the core function settings, we have to focus on online operations, do systematic content, and then it's over. We didn't want to do that because we felt it was important to balance new feature development with adding new gameplay.
Keep it fresh and keep veteran players happy with the game
GameRefinery: I guess you still have challenges because the game has been released for a long time, and there are players who have climbed to the top and are tired of old content. Every day there are new players downloading the game, and you don't want to lose old players or abandon the pit for new players, so you have to balance the content of the late game, but you're doing a good job in marketing. Of course, not all players want to gather 700 heroes.
Nicholas Day: It's true that not all heroes are good, not all heroes are noticed, and some heroes are more popular in certain scenes. You'll also get some low-level heroes, and some heroes will be easier to use at different stages of the game. It's a real challenge, and whenever a new player comes in, someone says, "I'll never collect those heroes."
Making sure that players have a satisfying experience at multiple stages, I think the beginning of the game is satisfying, if it's an advanced player, there are a lot of things to do later, some of the challenges I have our current focus is, make sure we pay attention to the mid-level players, that is, the users who have just passed the novice period, they know what they are doing, there is enough content to consume, but also to make them feel that they are not lost in a lot of content. We're always improving the getting started experience, making sure that new additions are quickly accepted by new players.
GameRefinery: There are a lot of modes in the game now, some of which may have been forgotten by you, I think there are at least 3 or more guild games in the game, and when the game was first released, there was none, will you turn to online operation because the whole game is a mess?
The future direction of the game's operation
Nicholas Day: One of the things we're doing now is focusing on when to stop feature development and when to start online operations? There are many types of online events on the market today, and some games even release expansion packs that are larger than the games themselves.
This is scary because people expect not "we're going to do another event this week, the challenge is this tower", but to give you exclusive content, you can only use her and free gifts, plus progress mechanism, plot, support content, users expect more and more new content.
What we're doing right now is focusing on developing more tools and automation for game planning, not programmatically generating content, but building these tools that allow you to do deeper, more engaging online event experiences and give players more depth and freedom, but at the same time, these things can't be done in half a year or a year. In the past, one of our game planners approached the R&D team and said he had a cool idea, and we started doing it from scratch. Now we're not doing that anymore and we're building in-house tools that allow us to keep doing these things, and if you're a gamer, you might feel like some content takes years to develop, but in reality, it only takes 3 weeks, which is our dream.
Cross-platform Plarium Play
GameRefinery: To ask a specific question, this game was originally a mobile game, but now it is also out of the page? Did you do this because you started out in page games?
Nicholas Day: There's actually no page game version, we did the PC client, which is Plarium Play, and we thought about rebranding and branding. This platform, we originally made for mobile games, and then we released "Raid" on Parade Play, and the players on the PC platform are different from the mobile game platform, and they are very different, which is very interesting.
Even from our perspective, what we're trying to understand is what would happen if the game was first released on PC instead of a mobile game? Basically, PC players are more engaged, they play longer per game, they have a higher LTV, and only on the Parade Play platform, this part of the user accounts for 30% of the PC client, which is incredible. I think the RAID players on PC are very hardcore users, they put in 19 hours a day to complete all the activities, they are very enthusiastic, and they have the highest quality.
We've also released a few third-party games and there's a lot to do right now, and as we release more games on this platform, it might be interesting if this trend will continue next year, but it's an eye-opener for us, and the engagement of these users is too high.
Streamer marketing
GameRefinery: Let's talk about another issue related to Raid, in the past year, we've seen a lot of game ads, some of which are standard buys, some of which are brand ads, and you have also done anchor marketing, can you talk about this?
Nicholas Day: That's a good question, we might as well take a step back and talk about how the game started, and when our game was released, streamer marketing was like the third leg of our marketing, a complementary tool outside of Google and Facebook, advertising platforms, affiliates. We quickly ramped up our promotion efforts, and I think 50 percent of Americans have seen Raid ads, but we don't think it's enough, we want to know where they learn about the game, some friends mention the game ads, and a lot of people see the brand ads and don't know what it's a game, or don't know what the game is for, and if there's no direct streamer marketing, you may never get that recognition.
The effect of streamer marketing is not always continuous, and you can't do the same thing over and over again, so as long as there are enough events or content in the game, or enough new angles to cover, it can be promoted through these channels, but after a certain time, its effect is the same as performance marketing. I think right now, within the game lifecycle, that's why we're exploring other marketing approaches and more brand advertising because they've heard the game through streamer marketing, especially in specific channels.
GameRefinery: I think it's not just streamer marketing, but most famously, you guys have Ninja as a character in the game, which obviously requires a lot of work, can't that kind of marketing do more?
Nicholas Day: Of course, ninja linkage is an upgrade, judging from the large number of anchor activities, working with him and his fans is a unthinking decision, the event is also very good, and the players are very agreeable.
The collaboration with Ninja was a phenomenal success, and his fan base was also very focused, playing the event when they came into the game and continuing to survive because of the love of the game, and our attributes are very compatible. Will we always do this? Probably not. Will you see more familiar faces in The Raid? Absolutely. But when it comes to finding collaborators, we were cautious from the start.
You may also see other IPs that I can't announce at the moment, and there will be different celebrities, but basically, these collaborative options have to meet the needs of existing players and attract new user groups that we want to explore.
We're an international company, but Raid was developed in Ukraine, and when we were working with Ninja, he was in Kiev, we were in Kharkiv, so the timing was more appropriate, and when we offered to work with him, the team felt that "he is one of the best players in the world, and it's right around us", so the event was outstanding in many ways.
GameRefinery: A lot of cross-border linkages, whether it is with celebrities or IP, most of them are based on monetization, but your cooperation is more focused on the consideration of engagement or retention, is this intentional?
Nicholas Day: Of course, we chose to cooperate more to increase participation, let players participate in the gameplay, there is also a consideration is user acquisition, the game itself performs well, if people come to play, we have a lot of payment points in the game itself, so the linkage does not think too much about monetization.
We have a lot of content and don't feel the need to add more monetization methods, so this event is more about making sure everyone enjoys the game and has a reason to get back into the game.
Mech Arena and its creative process
GameRefinery: Finally, let's talk about Mech Arena, which is a real-time 5v5 shooter that doesn't seem to have any similarities with Raid, does it?
Nicholas Day: I think it could be. There are some boring things on the back end that you can't see or notice as a player, such as the way we do promotions in the game store. But in terms of gameplay, they don't really have anything in common.
I also think that the quality of the new game is not as high as Raid, because the original design is like this, we are going to make more games, and if you look at the character details, you will find that some of them were once in Raid. That's one of the strengths of our studio, and I think when you start looking at the marketing campaign, when you see our commercial promo, you think, "This team did Raid, it's really good." In terms of actual gameplay, the two teams are actually parallel, and Mech Arena has been developed for many years, starting almost at the same time as "Raid".
GameRefinery: When designing a game, did your approach was to find a player base for the game, or to make a game for a specific group of players?
Nicholas Day: I think it's both, we first started concepting Mech Arena 5 years ago, when the famous games in this space were Wargaming's World of Tanks, Blitzkrieg and World of Warships, and Robot Wars, but they were a little uncomfortable for me in my 40s, and I wanted to find the feeling of playing Mech Warrior as a child.
Then we put a lot of time into playing Overwatch, then Rocket League, and we added more acceptable competitive elements, reduced death, murder and explosion scenes, and designed more competitive, fun and team gameplay for gameplay, which is where Mech Arena comes from.
A year ago, when everything came together, we found that this was the game we wanted to make for years.
When we started, we wanted to do a real-time action game, which was brand new at the time, we didn't sit on a similar project, and a lot of time was spent finding ways to do server architecture. All the basics, the technology and the like, it's a whole new category for us, and it's a long process, but it's fun.
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