The mobile game industry is seeing a shift in the nature of the games being made for mobile devices. While casual games in a variety of forms (puzzles, runners, word games, and more) have generally dominated the business, increasingly companies are looking to build games with more depth, something that can have the longevity and earning power of a Clash of Clans or a Game of War: Fire Age. This has also attracted the attention of veteran console and PC game developers who are seeing mobile as the place to reach the largest audience. The launch of DomiNations from Big Huge Games (published by Nexon M) two months ago was a prime example of this trend, as notable developers Brian Reynolds and Tim Train brought their experience with world history and strategy games to mobile.
Developer Tim Train spoke with [a]listdaily about the progress of the game in the two months since its release, and the infographic provided shows some interesting metrics the game has already garnered so far.
When we first talked, DomiNations was just about to launch. How has the game progressed since then, and has it met your expectations?
We launched almost exactly two months ago, and we’re pretty excited that DomiNations has performed at the top end of our reasonable expectations for an awesome launch. We’ve been super happy with it, spent a lot of time in the top 30. In Top Strategy Games we’re just behind the Supercell titles and Game of War, which feels to us like a good strong launch. Now we’re getting ready to launch our first content update, which is themed around what we’re calling the Oil Boom. Oil Boom adds American Civil War type stuff to the game, so you have the rise of the first machine guns and partisan warfare.
What have been some of the more effective marketing tactics that DomiNations has used to grow?
The biggest thing for us was taking human history as the subject matter. We’ve worked in history for most of our careers, and we think that it’s great subject matter. A lot of times marketing departments don’t really think of history as great subject matter, they think it’s kind of dry and everybody thinks of learning stuff in school that’s pretty boring. We think it’s actually a great subject matter for a game because everyone in the world knows something about human history, and everyone has a point of connection into human history.
Combining our iterative design philosophy of prototyping out game play with the power of the mobile strategy ecosystem to bring in new players, with world history as a subject matter, to us that’s a thing guaranteed to get a lot of people interested. There’s not really a competitive game on the landscape. When we started a few years ago, one of our strategic questions was would somebody beat us to market with a well-executed world history game, and so far that just hasn’t happened.
What’s next for DomiNations — how will you be adding to the game in the future Do you have a schedule for future content releases?
Our strategy has mostly been just when it’s done. We know some of the things we want to do in moving through all of the ages, we know we want to add some more multiplayer features that will be upcoming in future releases. The thing that’s most important to us is to be sure that we get the gameplay balance right, and that we have new features that people are really excited by. To do that we just have to play it every day, talk about what’s fun and not fun, rip out the stuff that’s not fun, add new ideas for cool features, and eventually we get to the point where it’s pretty fun. Then we start the process of debugging and releasing. I guess we are on less of a strict timeline than some other games would be, because we want to be sure everything we put out is cool, fun, and balanced.
Have social media and influencers helped DomiNations grow? What’s the community response been to the game?
Broadly speaking the community seem to really enjoy the game. To speak of the community as a single monolithic entity is probably incorrect, but we were really excited even when it was in geo-lock and justout in the Phillippines. After a few days we had several Facebook pages for alliances of players. As we moved into different countries we would see new communities of players springing up We get really good discussions online about which nation is best to pick — the best nation seems to be Japan right now, for instance,m but a lot of those top players who are making a run at being one of the top fifty players in the world seem to be zeroing in on the Romans. For us it’s all great — it means our goal with the nations was to create nations that are compelling with each play style. We love that different people are certain that their pick for which nation to play are so different, and there isn’t one clear answer depending on what kind of player you are.
We’re happy the community has helped balance the game. We are excited to be collecting their ideas for new features and what they’d like to see in future releases.
How has DomiNations been performing geographically — are some areas doing better than others?
So far we’ve been doing pretty well around the world. Again, one of those strengths of world history is that everybody has that connection to it. Broadly speaking, everywhere I’ve checked our chart position it’s been pretty strong. We do seem to do exceptionally well in Europe, where we’ve spent a lot of time in the top ten of various countries. Even going back to our days working on Civilization,Europe was always a really strong market for us. We’re seeing some of that repeated for this generation of world history games.
What have you learned about making a successful mobile game?
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that the market is interested in deeper strategic experiences in game play. There was a first generation of mobile titles that were a little bit more casual, aiming for a more casual player. We’re really happy that as the marketplace has evolved, you still have those great casual titles that people can enjoy for five minutes, but you’re also seeing new layers of depths getting added to strategy games. One of the explicit goals for DomiNations was to make a deeper strategy game experience, but not so complicated you’re just off into super hardcore land. We feel like we executed pretty well on making a game that had create new layers of depth, and is part of the next generation of mobile strategy games.
