Gururin Quest （ぐるりんクエスト）, developed by Japanese publisher, Gloops, is a free-to-play 2.5D action RPG featuring the unique ability to spin the world using a simple horizontal swipe to collect jewels, defeat enemies, and progress through levels. The fact that you can spin the world caught the attention of of Brian Ashcraft from Kotaku means that Gururin Quest was doing something special.
Official Trailer is below:
Gameplay and Business Model
The gameplay and business model is pretty standard for an RPG. To control your character, you use a virtual joystick and a dedicated attack and defend button. You get to carry 3 weapons in total; a main weapon, and 3 sub weapons as well as a shield to defend against enemy attacks. Each weapon and shield has an elemental type that is strong or weak against monsters of the opposite type. Use these weapons against minions as well as bosses at every level in order to progress to the next stage. Finish the level by completing certain objectives will net you additional stars and unlock new worlds to traverse.
The gacha pressure in Gururin Quest is actually fairly light. You can earn more gems and friend points (earned by using in-game friends’ weapons in levels) to gacha for better weapons and shields. Premium gatcha uses hard currency gems for Rare, Super Rare, and Super Super Rare weapons and shields. Friend points are used for neutral and normal weapons and shields. The surprising thing about their gacha is that Gururin Quest is actually transparent about its gacha rates; a practice most mobile game developers never reveal.
Marketing in Japan
Gloops decided to run a pre-registration campaign using Twitter by offering users two in-game prizes for people if the community retweeted a specific message 1000 times (and successfully achieved it 7 days before launch) from Gorgeous Space Pirate, a well known actor and comedian in Japan.
The pre-registration campaign and other marketing activities helped bring in 10 million users at launch and a total of 20 million users 3 days after launch. However, despite the massive amount of downloads, Gloops decided not to sustain the burst campaign and both download and revenue numbers started to fall.
What we can assume from these two charts is that the game is having trouble both retaining and monetizing users. This is the classic problem of doing a burst campaign without measuring the game’s KPIs with soft launch before grand launch. If Gloops had known that the KPIs weren’t very good, they could’ve fixed and improved the game beforehand and bursted knowing the game would achieve a certain floor of acceptable KPI.
Part of the problem in terms of the monetization could be that the game doesn’t have strong monetization hooks to get people to “use hard currency on continuing levels.” The gatcha mechanics are standard and perhaps the transparent gacha rates is preventing players from actually spending on weapons and shields. The world swiping element is a nice wrinkle to the game, but it would’ve been better to provide a limited amount of swipes in order to progress through levels so that the game could monetize off players’ lack of wisdom. While it might ruin the purity of the game, it would allow Gloops to acquire more users on an ROI basis.
Conclusion
While the game’s simple UI would seem to appeal to a Western market, I’m surprised they haven’t launched the game in the US. It could be the fact that most Japanese mobile gaming companies don’t have global marketing experience and budget or don’t have the resources to localize the game into other languages. The casual nature of the game and its Fez-like world spinning feature would definitely resonate with the indie gaming crowd in the West. While the levels aren’t terribly difficult to progress through, they’re interesting and delightful enough where I have to spend a bit of timing spinning the world in order to figure out the best way to reach the end of the levels.
Overall, it’s a fun game, but a little light on the monetization.
