Mobile games are continuing their astonishing growth, but the paths to success are getting harder to navigate. One of the ways is to extend an existing brand, but how Swedish game developer MAG Interactive is trying just that, and the [a]list daily caught up with CEO and founder Daniel Hasselberg to talk about how the company will grow by extension.
MAG Interactive starting developing apps when the App Store opened, but was doing it under contract to other companies. It wasn’t until 2012 that MAG released its own game, Ruzzle, to great success. Ruzzle is a word game where players compete against each other to form words under a time limit. Ruzzle was a smash hit, and eventually rose to the top ten list in 148 countries, and now has 50 million users. MAG Interactive also launched a quiz game, Quizcross, which has been on the top ten list for trivia games in over 50 countries.
CEO Daniel Hasselberg
MAG Interactive decided that while playing against your friends is fun, it’s also limiting. You have to have friends available and willing to play and be connected, and sometimes that’s just not possible. “Sometimes you want to play against your friends, but sometimes you just want that single-player experience,” said Hasselberg. The answer is Ruzzle Adventure, a level-based game with several worlds where you need to succeed to make progress in the game. “Some are more strategic, you need to find the right words at the right time, and some are similar to the classic Ruzzle which is time based,” Hasselberg noted. Social aspects are kept active through leaderboards, so you can compete with your firends.Â
Creating Ruzzle Adventure was a bigger project than Ruzzle for MAG Interactive. “The scope of this game is much more ambitious,” Hasselberg explained. “When we started out Ruzzle we were seven guys and now we’re 30. You need to produce much more content when it’s a single-player game, so the scope is much more ambitious.”
The reason MAG Interactive was willing to go to the additional effort is simple: Brand. “We try to work with the same brand, and build really strong brands. It’s a challenge to make some kind of hit machine,” said Hasselberg. “We want to build a really strong brand around Ruzzle, and associate really great games with the Ruzzle brand. We have already more than 50 million people who have played Ruzzle and enjoy it. Our strategy is to have all the existing players discover this game and enjoy it, because it’s a similar game.” Ruzzle Adventure is currently undergoing a soft launch in Sweden, and the early results are encouraging. “What we’ve seen in Sweden is people keep playing Ruzzle, it’s a complement rather than a supplement,” said Hasselberg.
Ruzzle stands out from other word games because it’s not just in English. “Supporting different languages makes people hesitate when they think about doing word games internationally,” said Hasselberg. “Not only finding good dictionaries, but in making the board fun to play. Currently in Ruzzle we support 13 different languages. That’s a continuous process, we’re going to be adding more languages.”
Ruzzle Adventure“I think that’s been one of the major keys to our success with Ruzzle,” Hasselberg continued. “There are not too many great word games in languages other than English. We built up a player base that was almost entirely European, 10 million in the first, year, and then it took off in the U.S. We got over 25 million downloads in the U.S. last year.”
The monetization differs between the two titles. “Ruzzle is a combo of purchase and advertising. The free version is ad-supported, and the paid version you can see your statistics,” said Hasselberg. Ruzzle Adventure is not ad-supported, instead it’s a classic F2P game. “It’s easier to offer boosters in a single-player game,” noted Hasselberg.
Hasselberg continues to see strong market opportunities ahead for mobile games. “In the Western world it’s more saturated when it comes to smartphones, but there are big upsides still in many countries,” Hasselberg said. He does acknowledge that most of the growth in smartphones is in Asia, “which doesn’t make much sense for us” given the nature of Asian languages and the difficulties of word games. “Our focus is still in the Americas and Europe,” said Hasselberg. That’s been very good to MAG Interactive, especially with their willingness to translate Ruzzle into many languages. “We reached over 40% of the smartphones in Italy, with 10 million downloads,” Hasselberg said “There are enough smartphones out there to be a fantastic market.”
So far with Ruzzle Adventure‘s soft launch in Sweden the game has been helping the original Ruzzle as well. “We’ve seen some pickup on the download side but even more on the engagement side,” Hasselberg noted. “Awareness is increasing. That’s the beautiful thing around building a brand, you can strengthen several products.”
