ZeptoLab’s CEO Misha Lyalin believes that overnight global success for a new mobile IP is still possible, but that novelty and good timing were keys to Cut the Rope’s massive adoption.
When Cut the Rope first launched back in 2010, the mobile gaming stars aligned. While Angry Birds was already ruling the roost on the iPhone, by the end of 2010 early adopters of Apple’s first iPad were looking for apps that could show off their device’s as-yet unproven capabilities. With its easy finger-swiping gameplay, increasingly complex puzzles and painfully cute mascot, Om Nom, Cut the Rope became one of the poster children for mobile gaming’s golden age, when small teams making simple games could go from obscurity to world fame almost overnight.
Three years later, Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab has just released the game’s first proper sequel, Cut the Rope 2. In the interim, the company has grown from just two permanent employees to somewhere around eighty, released three expansions that add new levels and mechanics to the game and witnessed Om Nom’s unlikely rise to superstardom as his pudgy green face found its way onto everything from bedspreads to plushies to oh-so-stylish fluffy slippers. After positioning itself as one of the must-have apps for the tablet age, developer ZeptoLab has grown Cut the Rope from a simple, if addictive, piece of child’s play into a global brand.
“[Cut the Rope] certainly wouldn’t have generated the same success today if it were launched in exactly the same way,” says ZeptoLab CEO Misha Lyalin. “I think that if [it had], it would certainly have been very popular, but one of the reasons it became so successful was that people had [just bought] their new [iOS devices]. They cut the rope on the screen, the candy dropped down and the little adorable monster ate it – it was a very novel concept. The timing was perfect.”
For any studio that becomes associated with a big-name success, there inevitably comes the issue of being cast in a role – of being ‘those guys that make Cut the Rope’. According to Lyalin, the balance that ZeptoLab have struck is to grow Cut the Rope while using its revenues and fanbase to develop new IPs – treading the fine line between risking its audience and typecasting. “Most of the eighty people we have now are working on new games, as opposed to Cut the Rope,” he says. “You have to have balance.”
Om Nom, Cut the Rope’s hungry hero, has since appeared on hundreds of pieces of merchandise around the world.
To date, ZeptoLab’s only other IP has been another simple, colourful puzzle game: 2012′s Pudding Monsters. While not as successful as Om Nom’s endless quest for hard-to-reach sweets, the game still earned a respectable Metacritic score of 73 based on 14 critic reviews. But while its mechanics are different – Cut the Rope had a heavy focus on physics and timing, while Pudding Monsters’ gameplay is more languid, based around the strategic sliding of jelly portions around a tabletop – Pudding Monsters was still an example of the sort of game that many console and PC players would snootily turn their noses up at as being too ‘casual’. It was an extension of the cutesy, cartoon-y graphical style that had become so associated with games from Apple’s App Store, and continued to perpetuate the idea that mobile wasn’t bothering to appeal to the hardcore.
Surprisingly, however, Lyalin agrees with that interpretation – up to a point.
“I dont’t think [the slow growth of hardcore games on mobile] happened because of public perception,” says Lyalin. “I think that happened because most [hardcore] games just aren’t made for an audience of half a billion people. Think about a game which that many people would want to play. Cut the Rope is exactly that kind of game, and is played by everybody. It’s played by entire families. I think that’s the real reason.”
On the other hand, Lyalin is quick to point out the difference between what the public thinks about gaming and the reality. However prevalent his cutesy creations become, there’s nothing inherent in mobile hardware that makes more adult games impossible.
“The general perception of the consoles is that they’re for people to play games on,” he says. “But the reality is that people spend more time watching video on consoles than actually playing games. So people’s perceptions are different from reality, always. Well, not always. But if you asked the public what the core gaming audience is, I don’t think they would guess right. Public perception isn’t something that is necessarily accurate.”
ZeptoLab’s most recent new IP, Pudding Monsters, continued the studio’s cartoonish, family-friendly art style, but dialled back the difficulty of its puzzles.
But as mobile technology continues to advance and critically acclaimed ‘mature’ games like XCOM and The Walking Dead begin to migrate to handheld devices, Lyalin believes there are still new technologies that will change the way we play, and perhaps more importantly, report what we play – echoing Sony and Microsoft’s recent messages about social networking and the importance of sharing on next-gen consoles.
“I think the big advance will be new technoloies like AR, combined with more natural social networking,” Lyalin says. “From the market’s point of view, consumers are going to [be playing] games that will somehow make people talk about them. It’s why Cut the Rope is so successful – because of word of mouth, people recommending it to other people. So in the future what I think is going to happen is that [the ability of] people to communicate with other groups of people will become very, very advanced.”
That future, as far as Lyalin is concerned however, will still have room for simple games like Cut the Rope, so long as their developers continue to innovate and keep pace with what consumers want.
“I certainly imagine Cut the Rope being a franchise that will last for a while,” he says. “That’s something we’re working very hard on. That sounds like a shameless sales pitch, but if you look at Cut the Rope 2, we’re making progress. We listen to our customers and we see what they tweet about and what comments they make. So now, if you look at Om Nom in Cut the Rope 2, he’s completely animated, there’s so much he can do. You can move him around, he’ll be very alive with a lot more emotions. If we continue to progress this way, if we don’t stop, if we follow the market and invent and innovate I think we’ll do just fine. Otherwise we’ll fail just like anybody else.”
The post Money for more rope: ZeptoLab’s Misha Lyalin on Cut the Rope’s success and mobile gaming’s future appeared first on Edge Online.
Source http://www.edge-online.com/features/cut-the-rope-interview/
0 comments:
Post a Comment