"Candy Smash Legend (Candy Crush Saga)" What to do next?

Tencent Science and Technology Zhang Dongyue July 17 Report

Mobile games short life cycle problems require solutions. Sitting at the top of the list for nearly one months, the Candy Smash Saga (Candy Crush Saga) is likely to disappear quickly from people's horizons at the speed of its popularity. So what's the next step?

The heat of the game really makes the mobile game developer King make a big profit. The game is entrenched in Apple's App Store and Google Play's free apps download list. According to the application analysis website Thinkgaming said, based on the 6.6 million user base, the "Candy smash legend" is expected to bring a daily income of about 650,000 dollars.

But "one months" seems to be the standard time period for apps to go from the spotlight to the fading out of sight. It is rumored that King plans to IPO on the U.S. market. With the one-month standard, the Candy smash saga should have been history before the fall.

Although King has been in existence for ten years, has released the Baiyu online game, but has never had the product to obtain like "The Candy Smash legend" the achievement. The company currently has two other similar mobile games: "Pet Rescue" and "Bubble Witch Legends (Bubble Witch Saga)", but both are not ready to reach the top App Store download list. Rescue

How do you lay out King's next move? The foreign media gives some advice: you can learn from other successful game publishers ' experiences-to acquire other assets and build a full-fledged company.

1. Acquisition of games, not developers

After developing a hit game, it is hard to develop other new products that can catch up with it, and many companies are under a lot of pressure, a problem that is trickier than it seems. Buying a game that has been developed is a wiser choice for a company with ample cash flow like king.

But acquisitions do not always work. Social gaming company Zynga has made a fatal mistake: buying the developer Omgpop, who you drew my guess (Draw something) for 180 million dollars, and paid 30 million dollars for the employee's stay. Zynga is at the peak of the company's acquisition, hoping that the small company can quickly produce another successful product.

However, Omgpop has not been able to continue the record of 1500 active users created by you draw my guess. After 6 months, Zynga announced a loss of $100 million, largely to blame for the takeover. After the release of your painting I guess 2 earlier this year, Zynga had to shut down its New York office and dismiss the Omgpop team.

Buying potentially untapped games from small developers may be a better option. "Angry Birds" distributor Rovio has some successful experience: through the new "Rovio stars" project to gather a batch of early successful release of the game. While the "Rovio stars" are still in cultivation, the "ice-breaking people: The Pirate Journey (ice breaker:a Viking voyage!)" is widely acclaimed among critics, while another game "miniature Skyscraper" (Tiny Tower) has been on top of the itunes pay game 10 rankings.

2. Choose the right marketing strategy

King has started marketing the surrounding products of the candy smash legend, and it still has much to do in this field, Rovio is a blueprint that can be copied. The Finnish mobile game giant has been successful with the "Angry Birds" concession, but a large part of its revenue comes from sensible marketing campaigns.

In April this year, Rovio announced a 2012-year income of $195 million, of which 45% came from the "Angry Birds" concession and marketing for children. The peripheral products of the Angry Birds, including lunch boxes, board games and fruit jerky, added 71 million dollars to Rovio's earnings.

There are, of course, negative cases. Zynga reached a deal with CBS about the "you draw Me guess" landing on television, though it had previously been a concern but had not ended. As a result, not all licensing cooperation is successful, and it may be more effective to stick to the goal of targeting a reliable group of people, such as children.

3. Do not give up the update "Candy Smash legend"

Mobile games that have been hugely successful--like Rovio's Angry Birds, Zepto Labs's Cut rope, and Nimblebit's miniature Ferris Tower--continue to thrive by providing updates to the game. Whether it's a new checkpoint, adding content to extend the game's life cycle, or just adding a new set of skins for the upcoming holidays, these older mobile games are always important in smartphones because they allow users to keep getting new experiences from them.

Disney's "Where's my labeled" is almost 2 years old. But according to Thinkgaming, the app still has a place in the forefront of the free apps rankings (most recently in 6th), with more than 500,000 daily active users. The game is to improve the user's stickiness through constant updates-more checkpoints, more arcane targets. By investing in the original "Where's My labeled", Disney has been able to inspire users ' interest in this new series of games, where's my Perry and where's my Mickey.

The "Candy smash legend" already has 350 off, but if you give up the game completely and do not update it later, these hurdles will not be enough to support the game further.

4. Establish Brand franchise

This is the most obvious, but also the hardest to implement: concessions should be both fun and repeatable. This means keeping the same game theme or the usual game mechanism so that ordinary gamers can easily identify the game's brand, but add new ideas in case the player is bored.

Imangi UBM's free run game "Temple run" topped the list of iphone and Android downloads in January 2011. The developer and Disney also launched the "Temple Run:brave", while Disney-Pixar jointly launched the same animated film. In the game, the Brave Princess Mérida, with superb bow and arrow skills, runs, jumps, glides, turns and pulls a bow and shoots a odyssey through the Scottish wilderness.

"Temple Run:brave" was released in January, according to App Annie, the download volume reached 20 million times in 4 days and became the most downloaded application in 112 countries. Imangi developed a concession with a clear theme that would help the next generation of games succeed.

Except for the name of each game that includes the legend (Saga), King has yet to provide a clear franchise model built on any recognizable subject. A reference to the theme of the candy World, in addition, to solve the puzzle mechanism for the support is also not.