How design focussed indie game developers are winning on iPhone
London’s independent developers are using stunning visuals to stand out in an overcrowded Apple App Store.
Looking at the exploding cartoon sweets that fill so many commuter’s phones, you’d be forgiven for thinking that little artistry and time is put into the fast-paced mobile gaming world.
Yet a number of indie developers are using beautifully-crafted design and artwork to catch the eye of mobile gaming customers. Abstract worlds are created, colour choices toiled over — the aesthetics come first; functionality later. It’s especially apparent in Apple’s App Store, an arena that has become the focal point for developers in recent years.
The lush graphics and immersive game-play evident in games like ‘Monument Valley’ and ‘Kiwanuka’ — both made in London — contrast sharply with the kind of titles that have come to dominate Apple’s charts: mindlessly addictive journey-killing games characterised by garish and basic imagery.
Freemium duopoly
Two such titles — ‘Candy Crush Saga’ and ‘Clash of Clans’ — have spent the last two years at the top of the market, making more money than the rest of the App Store combined in 2013 and 2014 through the ‘freemium’ model (free to download, with the option of paying for more lives, new levels or characters later on).
It comes as the number of games available in the Apple App Store has hit over 300,000, making it an exceptionally crowded area. Most users simply download whatever is top of the charts, meaning thousands of developers make nothing, or even a loss.
The design-led approach, however, has enabled indie developers to buck the trend, demanding the attentions of all sorts of gamers, as well as Apple, which is still an active broker in whether a game succeeds or fails.
Premium gaming
The games have a much higher production value than those that have come before, challenging and driving expectations of games that are played on phones. Despite the small screen, and the often simple controls, the visuals are highly intricate and detailed.
The business model is also often different. Many have reverted back to the premium model used in the early years of the App Store — paying a small fee for the download and then forgoing in-app purchasing.
The small team behind CMA Megacorp spent 18 months working from a London flat and living on savings to make Kiwanuka, a throwback to to the 1990s PC franchise ‘Lemmings’. Priced at just £1.49, it made its costs back within six weeks, and has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
‘I see making games as art,’ says Andrew Lim, who is one third of CMA Megacorp. ‘The only way of getting noticed as an indie developer now is by making something that is genuinely incredible.’
‘Monument Valley’, produced by the eight-man game development team inside Shoreditch-based creative agency Ustwo, is perhaps the biggest success story of the genre. Inspired by the work of graphic artist M.C. Escher, and lauded by critics as the most beautiful mobile game ever created, it has so far earned the firm over £2m in profit, after development costs.
Attention grabbing
‘The App Store is so crowded, you’ve got to come up with your hook — what’s going to attract people to you rather than other games,’ says Dan Gray, producer of ‘Monument Valley’. ‘We played to our strengths and made every scene and screenshot look like a piece of art.’
The vast nature of the App Store means most people spend mere seconds assessing whether or not to download a title. Much of the choice can come down to the impression browsers get from the screenshots and logos.
‘I spent a lot of time trying to get the promo material right — making sure the screenshots looked great and were representative of the game,’ says north London-based Nicoll Hunt, creator of the highly-stylised ‘Fists of Awesome’ game. ‘The only recourse I have is my own time and what people see on the App Store.’
Max Scott-Slade, who is set to release the design-focused ‘Kano’ with his Old Street-based Glitchers development team, adds: ‘The production and design has to be higher than ever at every level to gain any traction at all.’
Scott-Slade was part of the team that released ‘Plunderland’, one of the first complex iOS games, in 2010. It came up against just 28,000 other games — a tenth of what is now on offer. Despite selling over half a million copies, he says if it were released now it would be nowhere near polished enough to compete.
Winning over Apple
In a very short amount of time, Apple’s iOS has become the focal platform for not just mobile gaming, but the games industry as a whole. Over 64% of the UK’s 1,900 game-development firms — including those those that make console games — now specialise in iOS only.
Although the App Store created an entirely new form for gaming distribution, just like traditional shops selling physical games, getting prominent ‘shelf space’ from Apple has been critical.
Supercell reportedly spends £650,000 ($1m) a day to promote ‘Clash of Clans’ and keep it in the top five of the chart. The relentless marketing push is mirrored by King, with both even taking out TV advertising. Machine Zone, meanwhile, openly allocated £25m at the end of last year to promote its new game, ‘Game of War: Fire Age’.
For small independent developers there is simply no chance of competing with the behemoths. What they can do, however, is make it into the ‘featured’ section of the App Store, something that is completely free as it is curated by teams within Apple who check every game before it goes live. If the team are impressed, the game becomes one of the first things users see when they log onto the App Store.
Apple’s obsession with all things beautiful and (in the company’s words) ‘compelling’ has meant that the likes of ‘Monument Valley’, ‘Kiwanuka’ and ‘Fists of Awesome’ have been catapulted to the top of Apple’s ‘Editor’s Choices’ list, hanging around there for some time.
‘We’re really lucky Apple loved it; there’s no doubt about the fact that much of our success was down to getting featured,’ says Lim. Kiwanuka was featured by a number of international app stores upon release.
As well as being featured extensively, ‘Monument Valley’ has been included in the iPhone 6 marketing material (the example of which has been followed by Google with its Nexus 6 release) and was awarded an Apple design award earlier this year.
Three other design-focused titles made across the world also received an Apple design award in 2014: ‘Threes’, ‘Leo’s Fortune’ and ‘Blek’.
Future sustainability
Some in the industry are nevertheless sceptical as to how many more design-led games can storm onto the market, and gain the support of Apple and media coverage along the way.
‘There has been a clear aesthetic driven trend this year and focusing on design is the right path for indie developers with a strong concept but no marketing budget,’ says Pocket Gamer’s George Osborne.
‘But if the games are paid-for and have a narrative that has to be followed and then completed, the audience is smaller and more specialist. Developers making these kind of premium artistic games can continue to succeed, but they will need to be really unique.’
The end of Freemium?
Although many games built on aesthetics have opted for the pay-up-front premium model, the trend does not mean the end of ‘freemium’ by a long way.
The top 10-grossing games in Apple’s App Store in 2014 were all free to download. Every title regularly earned over £100,000 a day throughout the year through in-game purchases, while ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Candy Crush Saga’ both made between £1m and £3m a day, depending on whose estimate you go by.
The problem for the indies is that without a colossal number of downloads and players, freemium fails. On average, just 1% of users of the freemium model are converted to paying customers. Then, once users willing to pay are playing the game, the developers need them to keep playing and paying.
For games like ‘Monument Valley’, which can be completed in 90 minutes, freemium simply wouldn’t work — once it’s downloaded, there’s no incentive to spend money on a game that can be completed quickly.
There are, however, indie game-developers with a focus on high production and design who have been wooed by the opportunities of freemium.
Scott-Slades’ ‘Kano’ will be based on an adapted freemium model that requires users to either buy extra lives, or buy the game outright to remove time-based limits. It’s a conscious incorporation of the try-before-you-buy aspect freemium offers.
In November of last year, ‘Seabeard’, Hoxton-based Hand Circus’ third mobile game, was launched. It’s the four-man studio’s first foray into freemium. It took two-and-a-half years to make — an amount of time unheard of for a mobile game, particularly one that uses the freemium model.
Far from the basic look of ‘Clash of Clans’, the highly-produced, carefully art-directed release has the look of a PlayStation game, something that founder Simon Oliver hopes will mean it can compete with the free-to-play juggernauts.
Originally published in Courier issue 06, Winter 2015. More on Courier.
