The company with the most mobile-game downloads last year was not Tencent, Activision Blizzard or Nintendo, but rather a French start-up named Voodoo that has pioneered hyper-casual gaming. With over 1 billion players and 3.7 billion downloads, Voodoo, whose games include Helix Jump, Crowd City and Paper.io, is defying the trend to produce increasingly intricate games and making a huge profit.

Voodoo, however, is not the only company cashing in on the hyper-casual trend. Zynga recently purchased Istanbul-based Rollic Games for $168 million. Zynga chief executive Frank Gibeau called hyper-casual “the fastest-growing category on mobile,” which is the most profitable segment of the gaming industry.

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The hyper-casual concept challenges the standard process for developing games. Rather than spending months or years testing, enhancing and perfecting a game, hyper-casual publishers focus on quantity not quality, often releasing a new game every week. The apps, which are built by teams of two or three, feature crude graphics and basic gameplay. When a game proves successful, the publisher uses in-game advertising to generate revenue.

According to Stephane Kurgan, former chief operating officer at King, which developed Candy Crush, hyper-casual games are turning the industry on its head. While games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto are developed by hundreds of people, Candy Crush, a basic a free-to-play match-three puzzle video game, was churned out in six months by a small team.

“The barrier to entry is very low and it’s highly capital-efficient” to develop dozens of hyper-casual games and “see what sticks,” Kurgan said. Publishers like Voodoo, Rollic and Ubisoft-owned Ketchapp work with thousands of small studios around the world to develop new games quickly.

For gamers, hyper-casual games are a mere distraction. A typical casual user will spend just two and a half minutes a day on a game, according to a joint report on the market by Adjust and Unity, compared to 20 minutes spent by other gamers. In turn, the average income for each use averages just $0.13.

Given the revenue generated, hyper-casual games have to appeal to billions of players, not millions, said Andrei Dubinin, head of the new hyper-casual division of Russian publisher My.Games. Meanwhile, hyper-casual developers must continue to bombard users with ads for new games to support their business model.

Despite its questionable long-term sustainability, hyper-casual gaming does seem to enjoy broad appeal and even makes sense for a global population that is increasingly on the go and pressed for time. “I look at hyper-casual for inspiration,” Alexis Bonte, group chief operating officer at Stillfront, a Stockholm-based games publisher, said. “I think there is something there.”

Source: Financial Times

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