The publisher is confident it can defend its position, but for how long?
Lion Studios will continue to market Flip Trickster, and plans to help Erikkson retain his players long enough that they also become evangelists for the game - all fairly standard practice in mobile. Reaching No.1 on mobile is a feat in itself, but holding onto that position is a whole different challenge. And then when the game is ready, they can help push it up due to the resources they have on the marketing side."
Find that right partner who can help give you advice on how to make a game more marketable, how to tweak the game - which we did with Oliver. As an indie, you're down on headcount and cash resources. "Secondly, you have to find the right partner. That is also one reason why the game won our contest in all of the categories, it was something fresh for consumers within the hyper casual sector. we've seen gymnastics and parkour games in the past, but never at this level of scale. "First of all, make a game that is unique and the market hasn't seen much of," he says. In a market awash with match-three titles, base-builders, endless runners and countless other free-to-play titles, you need to have something that is both original and of high quality to stand out. The crucial deciding factor is, of course, the game itself. "Utilising all of those things combined and setting up marketing campaigns is what allowed us to achieve No.1."īut Vivas stresses that marketing alone is not enough to guarantee success in the mobile charts. "Part of our strategy was utilising all of the larger marketing channels: Facebook, Google, AppLovin, and our own inventory base," he explains. Perhaps unsurprising the rewarded video and full-screen interstitial ads proved to be the most effective, but Vivas says the firm was also more selective in which platforms it chose to invest its marketing budget in. While Lion Studios was unable to share the amount it spent on promoting Flip Trickster, the company did stress that reaching mobile users doesn't come from how much you spend, but how efficiently your spend it.įor this launch, Lion Studios used a mix of all the major ad formats available, including banner, interstitial, and rewarded video ads. While the retention and engagement are key to a mobile title's ongoing success, it's marketability that proves to be crucial in vying for the top spot.
"It's about having great content that people will organically look for, or doing selected marketing so when you bring people into the game, they're high value" My personal goal is probably to do 50 countries, but we'll have to see what happens." "But we've done a lot more localisation heading into this launch for Flip Trickster. "With previous games of ours, like Happy Glass, we've been able to hit No.1 in over 25 countries," he says. The US and UK are, of course, important markets when it comes to mobile, but Vivas confident this is just the beginning of Flip Trickster's chart-topping story. So we were confident in our ability but we weren't 100 per cent sure we'd make No.1."
"Flip Trickster had some of the best retention, engagement and marketability we'd ever seen. But we were confident in our ability, though, because during the contest we were able to market the game. "There was steep competition, especially in a week with King's new launch. "Actually, we're in the same boat - we never know we're going to reach No.1," Vivas admits. So how could the publisher be so confident about topping the charts? Even the biggest mobile studios cannot guarantee this. Interestingly, our interview was delayed a couple of times until the game reached No.1, but always with the certainty that it would. We spoke to Lion Studios' president Rafael Vivas about how this was achieved.
The winning game was Flip Trickster, a casual gymnastics game by 21-year-old Swedish dev Oliver Erikkson, which ended last week as the highest-ranking free title in both the US and the UK, according to App Annie. Entitled the Ultimate Game Changers, the goal was to take a promising mobile titles that have been previously released but not downloaded more than 100,000 times and relaunch it with Lion Studios in an attempt to reach No.1 in the charts. Mobile marketing firm AppLovin recently tried a new approach through a competition with its publishing division Lion Studios. Mobile is by far the most competitive market in the games industry, and companies of all sizes are constantly seeking new ways to stand out.