With Zynga dominating the mainstream of social games, it falls to other developers to fill in different niches. This is what Hooplo has done with sports and it already has a network of 5 million MAUs.
“One of the advantages of the areas we’re focusing on is we’re not going directly head-on with Zynga,” explains Aly Chesney, co-founder and CEO of Hooplo. “Sports is the first vertical we’re going after, and there’ll be some announcements later this year about some of the other verticals we’ll be focusing on.”
Sports are still a very nascent field for social gaming, and most of that has to do with presentation. Hooplo says that technology is finally starting to reach player expectations, and Howzat! Cricket already has 220,000 DAUs.
“It was quite hard to do this in Flash a couple of years ago,” says Ed Chin, vice president of product management. “The technology is at a point at which we’re really able to develop and distribute sports games with very high-caliber graphics. It’s what people expect to see. Some other genres aren’t quite so intensive.”
The game also does well in areas of the world like India, and a large part of that is due to ease of localization. “That’s a big focus for us,” Chesney admits. “In certain territories these sports are enormous, and [soccer] in particular, has such a global reach. One of the challenges of building a game for a global audience is that people react to things differently, but every country understands how to play [soccer]. It has a huge resonance across many different cultures.”
The company has also managed a coup by signing Cristiano Ronaldo, who has 43 million Facebook fans and 7 million Twitter followers, making him the most popular sporting figure in social media, complementing their new game, Ronaldo Footy. It has also struck a deal with the record-breaking athlete Usain Bolt, who has 6 million followers on Facebook.
“Not many companies have really cracked social sports games,” Chesney says, “so especially with the backing of these sports stars we’re in a good position to, hopefully, dominate. We can tap into Ronaldo’s 42 million Facebook fans, which is something that any other company thinking of launching a football game should bear in mind.”
If Ronaldo Footy and Usain Bolt Athletics are successful, there’s no reason why other deals shouldn’t follow. “We measure a lot of success at the moment by DAUs, but that doesn’t really tell you the whole story,” Chin says. “There are developers out there with much lower DAUs but their ARPUs are significantly higher. With the mass casual market, there are a lot of players there now, but as we introduce new niches we’ll get more traditional gaming audiences, who have been more willing to spend in the past. We’ll start seeing games with much smaller audiences but a lot more spenders.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
