I've been working closely with an indie developer in Korea called Wispsoft. We are helping them launch their game, Spirit Sweeper, on iOS and Android. We've started a wordpress dev diary about the ups and downs of trying to launch a game. Korea is a pretty interesting market and our dev has some great insight into working here.
Here's part of a recent post we did:
I've been working closely with an indie developer in Korea called Wispsoft. We are helping them launch their game, Spirit Sweeper, on iOS and Android. We've started a wordpress dev diary about the ups and downs of trying to launch a game. Korea is a pretty interesting market and our dev has some great insight into working here.
Here's part of a recent post we did:
Spirit Sweeper is a PvP game, and so we’ve been working hard over the weekend to make sure the server stuff is working correctly...The server issues have left me pretty frustrated. Now might be a good time to re-visit my reasoning for developing Spirit Sweeper. First, the Korean mobile game market has exploded over the past few years thanks to Kakao Talk. It’s to the point that the defining criteria for a smartphone is whether or not it can run Kakao. And in the beginning, the Kakao Talk era lead to huge downloads and huge success stories for games. But this is no longer the case, and there’s 2 reasons why:
- Kakao Talk allows gamers to invite non-gamers to their game. In the beginning, this function had no limits, and people were spamming their acquaintances left and right. And so Kakao Talk added limits to the invite system, in some cases limiting invites to 20 a day, or limiting the number of incentivized invites to 30. (Incentivized invites are when the user is given in-game currency prizes for a successful invite.) This caused the price of incentivized invite to escalate, marginalizing indie developers with low marketing budgets.
- In the beginning, Kakao was very selective about the games it carried on its platform. This is no longer the case. Perhaps it was because too many games had applied and they grew tired of filtering through the games, but somewhere along the line they severely loosened there standards. And so these days, you can see a lot of copycat games and other low quality games on Kakao. This has lowered expectations from Kakao users, thereby increasing the need for marketing. In fact, it’s nigh impossible for games to get downloads these days without marketing. This is in stark contrast to before, when the Kakao platform was so strong that it made marketing unnecessary.
Stay tuned to our blog and follow us on Facebook for more updates on the game and the blog. We'd love to have your support as we continue to try and launch the game on the global market.
