Have you ever seen a trail derail or a Juggernaut slowly grind to a halt? If you’ve been following Zynga’s finances the last few years, then you have. The once-mighty icon of F2P success, for many the personification of the bleak but unavoidable future of mobile gaming, has lost 40% of its share price over the past year alone. Earlier this week, Zynga announced that it’s closing down its data centers and moving back to Amazon’s cloud computing services, which it had abandoned in 2011 in a move that for many signified the company’s immense growth potential.
The troubles of a company that based its whole existence on acquiring or copying its competition are interesting in themselves, but I’ve found Zynga’s response to those troubles even more interesting. Zynga and a few other companies that are developing games in the same genre, like Space Ape, developer of Rival Kingdoms, and Big Huge Games, developer of DomiNations, are explicitly trying to attract those who would be considered more “traditional," or “experienced" gamers rather than rely solely on “casual" gamers (I use these terms in the manner they are often employed in the industry, but I personally don’t divide players in such clear-cut categories). Even though we often read news that seem to point to traditional gamers increasingly being considered irrelevant by those companies that rule the App Store charts – like the recent news about the upcoming Britney Spears game – there might still be hope for traditional gamers. Perhaps this new strategy by F2P developers of attracting traditional gamers is indicative of a growing belief that those types of gamers are more likely to help a game have long-term success rather than the rapid-growth-rapid-demise cycles so often experienced by most F2P games.
Zynga’s decision to close its data centers hasn’t surprised any analysts, who’ve been closely monitoring the company’s shrinking workforce and the continuous drop of its active users (from 302 million in 2012 to 118 million in 2014 and dropping). It hasn’t even surprised most iOS gamers, who haven’t touched a game with a “ville" suffix for quite some time. Still, it does remind us of the difficulties many developers of F2P casual games encounter when it comes to enjoying sustained success. Companies like King Digital Entertainment are viable and thriving at the moment, but at the same time they are extremely one-dimensional in their gaming development philosophy and depend almost exclusively on casual gamers. As Zynga’s fate has shown us, and as many have remarked in the recent past, when the novelty of a casual game fades, its players leave in droves and head to the next hot casual game on the App Store (a great example being Draw Something that went from huge to nothing in the time it took me to draw Kermit the Frog). Although I don’t have any actual statistics at the moment, I have a strong hunch that there’s a much greater horizontal mobility (moving from one company’s game to another company’s game) from “casual" rather than “traditional" gamers because of the almost-identical mechanics of many casual F2P games. From my personal experience, it’s easy for gamers to go from Clash of Clans to other base builders and back again.
In an attempt to create a more robust player base by attracting the kinds of players who tend to be more “loyal," the two latest “base-builders," Rival Kingdoms and DomiNations, as well as Zynga’s Empires & Allies, are explicitly trying to court what Space Ape calls “experienced gamers," players who “expect depth and sophistication" from the games they play. A quick comparison between the way these developers promote their games and the way their “ancestor," Clash of Clans, is being advertised is indicative of this shift in focus. Clash of Clans, as most of us have recently witnessed, was advertised during the Super Bowl in an ad starring Liam Neeson, an actor who’s been starring in one of the most “casual" action movie franchises around.
Unlike King Entertainment, DomiNations flaunts on its front page the game’s designer, Brian Reynolds, and his work on Civilization II and Rise of Nations. Similarly, Space Ape is telling anyone who’ll listen that Rival Kingdoms offers the “depth and sophistication" that will satisfy the experienced gamer. And Zynga is constantly emphasizing the Command & Conquer pedigree of its recently-released game, Empires & Allies (even the title is styled similarly). I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that these big F2P developers are all trying to portray themselves as creating games that are deeper-than-your-average-casual-game because their tactics are too similar and their timing too close to be accidental. Rather, I see a shift in marketing philosophy with big F2P titles emphasizing their depth and skill-based gameplay almost as much as they are promoting how they can be played while you’re waiting for a Starbucks coffee.
I’m not sure if “experienced gamers" are actually the solution to issues of game sustainability, but these companies’ marketing teams seem to think that these types of gamers are at least part of the solution. When it comes to traditional gamers and the way they view games like Clash of Clans, I wonder what, if anything, could remove the stigma of “being too casual." I suppose we’ll know in a few months whether games like Empires & Allies, Dominations, and Rival Kingdoms have managed to add more “experienced gamers" to their ranks or whether it was all for naught.
