If we were to talk about a mobile game that we played ten years ago, I wonder who your first impression is?
Ten years ago, the market was when smartphones were just beginning to gain popularity in the domestic market. At that time, the iPhone had just come out to the 4th generation, HTC was still the mainstream mobile phone brand in China, and every month everyone needed to calculate the remaining traffic of the era. At that time, the vast majority of mobile games we could play were casual stand-alone. However, during this period, many classic gameplay games of the global phenomenon emerged.
Today we want to share with you one of the "Subway Surfers" (Chinese "Subway Surfers"). As a game that has been online for ten years, Subway Surfers is still popular, and it can often enter the top of the download list of various countries and even frequently reach the top. It makes us wonder why Subway Surfers has been on fire for a decade. What lessons can we learn from this?
Excerpt from Subway Surfers on May 23
Enter the iOS download list top 10 countries and regions to display
Programmers run, deadlines expire, and the "legend" of legendary games begins
Subway Surfers is a mobile game jointly developed and published by Kiloo Games and Sybo Games, which was released in October 2012, entered China in 2017, and has more than 3 billion global downloads in 2020. The original development team for Subway Surfers was just five people. Peter Klogborg, a Danish game design consultant who is one of the developers, said in 2011 that in 2011 he and four friends planned to work on a parkour game together, and one of them, Morten, owned the IP of the character in the DADIU game Catnapped. So they decided to use this character as the protagonist of the game and named the game Black Bears Gold Rush.
Kiloo Games, on the other hand, set a deadline for project completion while agreeing to the agency release. When everything seemed to be going well, in the second month of development, the game's programmers disappeared after leaving a message that "there was no time to write code", so Peter had to write code while designing the game. The result is obvious, the project was not completed before the deadline.
After communicating with Kiloo Games, Kiloo Games eventually handed over the concept of the game to Sybo Games, and Peter and several others joined Kiloo Games.
However, the game did not go according to the original plan of Black Bears Gold Rush, and Peter worked on a project called HoodRunner, which tells the story of a black man who scribbles on a train and escapes from the police after being discovered.
Sybo Games' vision for the game at the time was to combine Black Bears Gold Rush with the game short game they owned, train bombing.graffiti animation. The short film is still available for viewing on YouTube and has 650,000 views.
The short film, which SYBO Games founders Bodie and Sylvester co-produced after graduation, won the first prize at the 2009 Hamburg International Animation Competition and founded SYBO Games after winning the award. At the same time, the game company Kiloo also noticed the short film and was interested in its style and setting. Kiloo approached SYBO Games with the aforementioned parkour gameplay and offered to use the short film for the game, and the story of Subway Surfers began.
10 years of enduring: three Weeks of Renewal, ten years as a day
For the success of the game, we learned from a previous interview with Mathias Gredal Nørvig, CEO of SYBO Games. SYBO Games has always insisted on improving the quality of the game, including the look and feel and content. Subway Surfers is a never-ending world journey, updated every three weeks, that takes players on a journey through the unique charms of the world.
SYBO Games believes that content updates are a key reason why Subway Surfers is able to endure, allowing the game to create a continuous, fresh gaming experience for players. And this routine update and "world tour" has helped SYBO Games maintain a large active player base. After each update, players can see new characters, new items, make new friends and challenge new high score records.
To keep in touch and interaction with players, Sybo Games also created SYBO TV, which provides live streaming and trailers for games, and does not provide a sharing platform for game streamers and content creators.
Such a popular game, linkage must be indispensable. According to the data, "Subway Surfers" has been linked by Wal-Mart, including the hard wide in the game and the sale of related peripheral products.
The Miami version of the new character linkage
The Las Vegas version is linked to Lady Gaga's Born So Foundation.
Of course, in addition to maintaining the popularity of a game, in addition to the official operation, the players' second creation is also indispensable. Below is a map of the Subway Surfers that the player made in Roblox. The video garnered 4.8 million views on YouTube.
There are also breaking the dimensional wall and coming to a live subway Surfers. At the same time, the chasers have become more and more outrageous from the initial police. For example, the pink piglet in the picture below, even the Pac-Man and the Hulk come to run.
Videos like these have garnered millions or even tens of millions of views on YouTube, helping the game stay hot and attracting more new users.
From a commercial point of view: why is it still the king after ten years on this track?
Roski spoke with some producers about the continued popularity of Subway Surfers. From our sharing based on the current point in time, there are two core points:
1. There are not many parkour products in recent years, and the classic products themselves have a natural amount and the platform will repeatedly recommend them from time to time. For example, in the App Store us alone, from August 2018 to the present, Subway Surfers has been recommended as a boutique game 638 times, and some recommended resources have been up to 1 year;
2. The game user group is low in the age group, and there is a continuous periodic user turnover. Although the children have been flowing for a long time, they have always had new users entering. Of course, Subway Surfers itself has been buying. With a brand IP image, it is actually very cheap in terms of purchase volume.
In terms of buying volume, according to the majority of big data, the recent "Subway Surfers" iOS version of the main investment in the United States, accounting for more than 50%. The top three delivery channels are Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram. Recently, the most popular advertising material is the 10th anniversary promotional video. When downloading statistics on the platform list, the returning users who download again in more than 60 days will be judged as new users. The combination of factors makes the product ranking stable at a high level.
In terms of monetization, after 10 years of development, the commercialization model of Subway Surfers is also in line with the trend. The current game adopts a hybrid monetization model, including in-app purchases and ad monetization. In-app purchases are more conventional, including various gift bags, gold coins, props, etc. In terms of ad monetization, incentive videos are used for in-level resurrection, doubling the reward at the end of the level, and opening daily chests. However, the addition of interstitial ads in the game is still relatively unexpected.
Looking back at the birth of Subway Surfers, 2012 was still the era of 2G and 3G, and the speed of the network limited users from changing games frequently to a certain extent. And at that time, smart phones were in a period of development, and the fully evolved hardware configuration would bring new user needs. Just as hyper-casual games have attracted a large number of pan-users after the explosion, even users who rarely play games at that stage will download a few games to try.
The success of Subway Surfers led to a wave of parkour games. Taking the domestic market as an example, when "Everyday Cool Run" was launched in 2013, it set a number of mobile game records such as reaching the top of the App Store best-seller list on the first day and flowing water of over 100 million yuan on the 12th. After the third anniversary of the launch, the cumulative number of users exceeded 600 million, tens of millions of daily active users, and various offline events were held.
However, with the development of the Internet and smart phones, more and more novel ways to play appeared on the market, and after the gradual decline of parkour games, few manufacturers dabbled in parkour play, until the outbreak of ultra-casual, once again verified the charm of parkour play.
Sigh: After the game, developer Sybo and publisher Kiloo took different paths
With the rise of other categories and the decline of old products, the follow-up basically failed to be called a blockbuster parkour game. For users who love parkour games, Subway Surfers has basically become the relatively only option. The "World Tour" launched by Subway Surfers has also given players around the world more expectations.
In 2015, Subway Surfers announced that it had exceeded 1 billion downloads.
Subway Surfers exceeded 2.5 billion downloads in 2019.
In 2020, Subway Surfers will exceed 3 billion downloads.
Behind such amazing results, there is a hidden difference between developers and publishers.
At the time of the birth of Subway Surfers, the game was jointly operated by SYBO Games and Kiloo Games, of which SYBO was responsible for the development of the game, kiloo was responsible for the promotion and operation of the game, etc. From the current point of view, it was the relationship between the developer and the publisher. The success of Subway Surfers has left both companies to make a lot of money.
However, in 2015, it was rumored that there were differences between the two companies: SYBO Games wanted to focus on the creation of game IP, create better games through continuous improvement of product quality, and form its own publishing team to create a complete business chain. Kiloo Games, on the other hand, is more focused on performance, such as developing its own games and sub-agency new products to strengthen its publishing role. In addition, SYBO Games does not like to show off its success, while Kiloo Games is overexposed, often showing off its achievements in media interviews and social media. Including some series of "mismatch" has taken the two companies down different paths.
Judging from the results, Kiloo Games' voice in the industry has gradually disappeared, and its self-developed product "Smash Champs" launched in 2014 and "Stormblades" in 2015 have not achieved satisfactory results. SYBO Games, on the other hand, is running its own IP step by step, and has launched "Subway Surfers" characters who have traveled to the ancient "Stormblades", but the results are not as good as "Subway Surfers".
To this day, Subway Surfers has long occupied the top of the list in overseas countries or regions, and Kiloo Games has not been heard for a long time. It is impossible to judge the right and wrong decisions of the two companies, after all, from different points of view, both companies have chosen to match their own development direction. SYBO Games is the identity of R&D, so it is normal to continuously update the game to ensure a longer life cycle of the product. As a publisher, Kiloo Games is also reproached for constantly releasing new games.
However, in the stage of vigorous development of mobile games, SYBO Games can keep itself without choosing to blindly expand, and perhaps it is this "conservative" attitude that allows SYBO Games to "ten years of consistent updates" and create the enduring legend of Subway Surfers.