How Rollic Is Looking At The Future Of Hypercasual Games Such As Tiktokable

And seven of its games reached No. 1 or No. 2 top free download game places on iOS. Three games Hair Challenge, High Heels, and Tangle Master 3D have reached over 100 million downloads. For his love for hitting horror games, Zynga bought Rollic for about £168 in August 2020. Rollic acquired four studios of its own Uncosoft, ByteTyper, Cresear Entertainment, and ZeroSum as it expands on the hypercasual market. And the company launches winter themed customizations for 16 titles with in-game events this month. In winter wear, the players can strut onto a snowy runway and snowboard to get to the finish line across Rollics top titles. That’s all part of keeping the games alive and humming. It did a partnership with the designer Kenneth Cole to celebrate Pride Month in High Heels. I talked to Burak Vardal, who founded Rollic in 2018, about the success and his expectations for one of the fastest growing segments of the game industry. He wants to make a ballpark-style, Tikakotable game whose play is captured in the charts. With a vision to 2022, the company plans on expanding its portfolio with more new launches and bold beats to players around the world. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. Above: Burak Vardal is Rollic’s co-founder. Image Credit: Rollic/Zynga GamesBeat: What is a supercasual game? For more information, what do you think works with hypercasual? Vardal: Hypercasual is simple gameplay. This game takes up the actual consumption of the current audience and of the current world. That is extremely hypocautional. The developers should take it long because they will understand the game in four seconds after you see it. They have three or four seconds to find out what the game means. An acquisition of the user is very important in all mobile games. It’s very important in all of this – especially in the context of hypercasual. You have to understand your game in three or four seconds. If you can think, you’ll start finding the best mechanics in real time. During the craziest times, I have to stop working with my users. And that doesn’t mean that retention is certainly too low in hypercasuals. I can’t share some hard data right away, but High Heels and Hair Challenge have a retention that is comparable to more mainstream casual titles. The two-day retention, the four-day retention, is compatible. To do that, you don’t have to go too deep. You need a simple and clear, but sharp, approachable design. You want fun story animation and gameplay animation. That’ll help you explain it in 3 or 4 secs. This year, too, showed us how important it is to be TikTokable, as I said. It was the word we coined earlier this year to define some of our titles. I think it is all right. That gives you a sense of what it is. People are scrolling through TikTok very fast, aren’t they? People often watch these videos for approximately three or four seconds, too. You have to catch their attention quickly. That’s better than hypercasual. It is no secret that the ice has gone back to the middle of two or three years. That’s why I think I really enjoy naiveness. Next year we may return and arguing over what it is. If you asked me this question two years ago, I would’ve said that nobody putting up a table top to play a hypercasual game would’ve been crazy. But now this works. It’s a very fast-moving genre that morphes to its own worlds, even from time to time. GamesBeat: I’d like to see the hypercasual market from the perspective of a year in view. Looking back to one year ago, what is the environment like, and how have you thought it’d changed? It was a great year for us. We had a lot of great news coming in. The key to this is our new evolution in game design in hypercasual. That has significantly changed the business this year. With the first and last game, a lot of the games have been published by YELVE since the first and second half of 2021. Both games were the most downloaded in the United States for the first time in two consecutive quarters. They began a new trend by naming the “chikspot” game. The company has really influenced the next generation of mobile gamers, Gen Z. We had considerable organic influence on Tikspot with their unique design and character animations. The industry followed the same trend as that of the high heels and hair competition and started trying to create new hits. This is the highlight for us. As a result, we overpassed one billion downloads for the year. It’s very competitive all the time. As an example, the key to becoming the leader is to be the trendsetter in game design. This is what Zynga and Rollic have done this year. GamesBeat: What year did you start using hypercasual? Vardal: Rollic was founded in the year 2019 in order to earn money. We were always hyper-casual publishers and developers. This is going to be three years in a month. We were very young, but in general it’s quite modest. The journey got underway till 2017, at least, in a larger scale. Compared to our competitors, we started too late, but I think we could now argue that we were in the position leading. Above: Zyngas Rollic celebrated Pride Month on the Hill. Credit: Rollic/Zynga GamesBeat: How many titles do you launch in a given year? Vardal: In total, we have launched more than 60 titles, and in this year, we have only launched more than 30 titles. Seven of those titles was ranked in the first or second place in the US app store, which was a huge success for us. Sixteen of our titles have gotten high acclaim. But in total we launched more than 30 games this year. GamesBeat: What do you think of the audience? I guess you have more playerbase than many games. Vardal: We surpassed 1 million downloads. That meant you needed a mass audience for this. But the audience that changed everything this year was the TikTok audience. That really started mobile gaming this year, the newcomers from Gen Z. That was a huge achievement, so we could budge this audience with organic support on a larger scale. This year is the changing news in terms of audience reach. Above: Rollic took on Pride Month in Heels. Copyright: Rollic/Zynga GamesBeat: When it comes to the way developers operate hypercasual games, it reminds me of the way many different people worked around the early mobile and free-to-play casinos, where they had many launches and then narrowed them down. Kabam was previously one of the example, where they started playing a lot of different games and then finally ended up spending the whole time on the Marvel Game of Champions. This became one of their only important games when they started. They argued that the top 10 mobile games would attract this enormous audience. But some hypercasual seems to have opened it up far beyond the big money games. Companies have now published thirty games per year in this space, giving many ideas. Do you think they’re going to narrow down, it seems in other emerging areas like gaming? The difference is the consumption habits around the world. Now hypercasual fits that place a lot more. The number of users’ attention is very low now, mainly due to their new year’s Gen Z audience. The new trend reflects all the fun they are doing. That’s what they want. It’s very difficult to believe that the current audience will spend many days, months and years on one game. Thats when hypercasual plays become a new type of game. We give a game to users, they often play it, and we know what they like. That helps us to do more of that in the next few months. We have lots of data. We launched 60 games, and learned about our user behavior. We know what they like, who spend their time. That gives us great insight to re-create new projects and bring up more hits on scale than our previous games. This year’s example is High Heels. It was a big game beginning in the year. It had huge organic traction on TikTok. The file has reached 100 million downloads. Hair Challenge, which again passed 100 million downloads, was a simple idea created by high heels. Again that was a guy, a Gen Z-style character, a more precise character animation, and a very simple and fun gameplay. But games had a large scale in the same year, and even in some of the same months. That means our audience want more content. Production in our business is very important, and that’s so important to the future of mobile gaming. Live service, live game updates. That’s a matter only a handful of companies can deal with well. One of them is Zynga. As long as we do, we can join the live services culture with that production method. But when it comes to mobile gaming, the future is the future. You know what concepts are scalable, the ones we can re-create. We already know a lot about live services from Zyngas culture. If we can make it, we don’t need to stick to one game. This can be replicated in many games, and the market will dominate in the coming years. That’s the future of mobile gaming. Yes and no longer need any new concepts, not only live service, but even some live services. This is the new concept of Hypercasual that comes into play. Rollic bought several things. Image Credit: Rollic/Zynga GamesBeat: For a lot of companies this year, something interesting and often frustrating, was the Apple privacy push around IDFA. Frank Gibeau mentioned that the benefit of acquiring Rollic was that Zynga would have that much larger channel of people coming into the Zynga game ecosystem, and the company could share other games with them. Those games could begin virally through crosspromotion. Was that what you said a benefit, that the customers you bring in through Rollic spread across the Zynga universe? The effects of the Apple privacy change on Rollics have not been significantly influenced. Our audience is a mass audience. We don’t want to target. We really see the entire universe. Even after the privacy change, it’s easier to communicate with our current audience. Rollic remained profitable after that. And yes, we helped bring a mass audience to Zynga. We’re working with their teams on our cross-promotion techniques. We’re testing new things, seeing new results and planning for the future. But it’s all that I can say right now. GamesBeat: We saw many industry-wide activities like that. Acquisitions of companies that became, in some ways, more vertical, as a way to tackle this shift in the horizon. Deals that were logical in terms of access to more gamers made sense. Vardal: More than 600 million of our total downloads were unique, a kind of thing that is unique to the users. There are about one player out of the planet who have played a Rollic game. This is a huge number. That’s why you are just right. The audience size, most commonly called hypercasual games, brings value to the company, and many other data data has its advantages. In a larger franchise you can create something like a mini-game, whether using the data or using it to create a new production method. For future mobile gaming, especially in the wake of the privacy changes, these mass-audience games play a huge role, to determine the strategies of large companies. GamesBeat: Would it be interesting if each game company had a hypercasual approach? Yes, rollic was as successful as Rollic was. But I think hypercasual isn’t a thing you can take on at large. It doesn’t make any sense at a small scale. This business is hypercasual, as it is a football game. It’s necessary that you make the best games in this competitive environment. We do our games in three working days. Were updating them and launching them in two weeks, mostly. That’s why your team needs to be very agile. You should be able to operate quite efficiently. If you are not ready for this in your company culture, then you shouldn’t move to something if you’re not on your own. What Zynga did with Rollic helped a lot. They respected our culture. Our ideas are very different. They respected him, and gave us an enormous space to continue his business. We found a very good environment in Zynga to grow our business and had a great year in 2021. Rollic ringing on the holidays with custom events. Image Credit: Rollic/Zynga GamesBeat: What are some things you have to mind about in the past and the future? Vardal: We’ve got good results because I think the future of hypercasuals can depend on live services. Rollic managing all of our titles as a franchise. Even though we have 60 games, we believe 60 franchises we have to manage now. I think this is a crucial part of the future of hypercasual. For example, this year we created the first real online team of hairs and women’s organizations (CCC). Users can interact and play their own unique game without the use of a virtual game. This is a very casual update due to the game genre, but it worked well with Hair Challenge. People loved them. Since you want to generate long-term revenue and long-term profitability, it’s necessary to also start performing deep dive live services. The first pity for us is to continue doing the live service updates with the help of Zynga and their culture. In the second part, it is about new trends. This years trend, these Pistoys – we created them. It is going to be a long time, but the best thing for Rollic or for our competitors is to find this new trend for 2022. You need a lot of production to do that. If gaming history is hinting, then it will likely be sequels to hypercasual hits. Vardal: To find that trend, it is necessary. You require a lot of testing, and many prototypes to test. If you have power in hypercasual, you won’t be able to scale your business. That’s why Rollic is able to create the trends for the next year. Let’s call it a reality. We want to combine the new and advanced, and the efficient and reliable standards in live services. That’ll be the key for 2022. Take a play: Do you do so much experimentation? Is only one small percentage of prototypes being hit? Or did you get better batting average, or was you able to find a heftier average, then so on? Vardal: We did the test three years ago and the average to ship was far lower. He has been better every month because we have more data every month. We know what to produce. Our ideation quality gets better. Our update quality is improving. All in all, our games get better. We’ve got a lot of success each month and every quarter. GamesBeat: When you measure quality, how can you find the best players who are successful in game development? Most of all, they think that hypercasual is with stereotypical impressions. One could not make high-quality games in this space. Vardal: I think this year was a change in the field. When somebody saw High Heels, they knew that was something special for the gaming world. Apple has the top three games in the company’s competitive awards after the end of the year. This game was hypercasual, but it had a huge change of mind. Everybody tried to draw up new ideas such as that. I feel like you have proved that in the hypercasual genre you can create a whole lot of stuff for the whole game. This year was important in bringing that understanding up. I’m so happy about it. GamesBeat: This certainly surprised me, because I played so much this year. Vardal and Pride Month have been a successful collaboration. It was every time the game was played on Times Square. It became a huge brand. The video game itself was so popular, as it became a virtual reality game. It isn’t all that often that you see such a thing happening when you are playing a hypercasual game. After that, the relationship with our developers a bit altered. Now they know they can create something that is trendsetting for the entire game industry. I think there’s a problem with developers who work in hypercasual, at least from a closer distance. When youre in it, its very competitive. You must be very fast. You have to be flexible. You need talent to create that type of game in a very short time. Now, compared to the number of reports coming from Rollic developers in the world, the number’s ever higher. It’s growing fast. We sent emails from Indonesia and France. We have lots of partners we work with in Turkey. We’re very grateful for many requests from Scandinavia, Russia, Ukraine, all over the world. The newcomers, the less experienced developers with fresh talent, want to go into hypercasual. We have a lot of partners who used to develop more casual games, but now they are working with Rollic to create more casual games. Several of our partners are from the computers and the mobile market, even for VR. As a result of Hypercasual becoming a trend nowadays, developers are changing the way people write a book. Whether or not they’re big or small, you must be looking at an exceptionally attractive book and let yourself appreciate the value of that book. It can be helpful whatever you are producing. There are many PC games that I see, such as top selling on Steam, which is not traditional hypercasual. But now that the PC is on, we don’t call it that for a reason. The developers and their engineers are increasingly acknowledging that hypercasual is vital. 2021 was the best year i’ve ever seen from our developers. GamesBeat: Are there anything you want to close with today? Vardal: We have many acquisitions this year. We acquired four of our studio partners. Next year well continue to look for more partners, since we’ve been to the publishing industry and we know how these teams work when it comes to data, production and culture. Publishers like Rollic have huge advantage when it comes to new talent and mobile gaming with some other platform and thus, the success of becoming more talented partners has remained competitive. We were creating a successful new funnel for Zynga, enabling him to acquire more talent as soon as possible. Both companies adhere to this plan, and I think it will play a huge role in our business next year.

title: “How Rollic Is Looking At The Future Of Hypercasual Games Such As Tiktokable” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-06” author: “Kathleen Miller”