Hendrik Klindworth began creating games aged 14, and in 2003, with his brother Eike and their school friend Michael Zillmer, he launched the first iteration of Tribal Wars, upon which the powerful InnoGames empire was built. Calling on vast experience in free-to-play strategy titles, he’s well placed to assess where the market is headed.
The market you operate in has become extremely competitive – how do you think your games compare to others’?
We have four big games on the market – Forge Of Empires, Tribal Wars, Grepolis and The West – and one thing we’re very proud of is how sustainable they are. For example, Tribal Wars will be 11 years old this year, and it’s still growing in terms of revenues. Last year was its best year ever, and this year it will be even better. So we have a strong focus on sustainability, and that’s something that we’re very proud of.
The term ’free-to-play’ carries lots of baggage nowadays – how do you feel about it?
As a model, free-to-play can be a very fair one. It gives the player a chance to start playing the game to see if he likes it – if he does, then he might choose to pay. Maybe certain companies became a bit too greedy, and maybe that was a time when free-to-play’s reputation became damaged. Another term that is interesting to me is free-to-win, meaning that you should also be able to win the game even if you’re not spending money. I like it as a term, and maybe we’ll see it become more popular in the future.
Does it feel like the boom time for browser games has passed?
The mobile gaming market is growing faster, of course, but I wouldn’t say the browser market has peaked. The growth in pure browser games isn’t as strong as it was in the past, but you would expect that because a certain amount of players are moving to mobile devices to play browser games, and some are also using multiple devices to play the same game, which is where it gets interesting. It’s something we’re keeping in mind with all of our games – it’s very important that our games are crossplatform. All of our players tell us clearly that they want to be able to play our games on multiple devices, and we’ve made that possible with some of our games already, and we’re working on making others compatible too.
How dramatically has the browser game market changed in recent years?
To some extent, looking back four or five years ago, the strategy browser game market was just too easy, but now it’s a real business. I mean, the costs involved in acquiring a new player have risen into the sky, but on the other hand we’ve become much better at making games, so our players are more likely to spend more time with them. But the market has changed. In the early days, it was always clear to us it was too easy at that stage.
You have over 100m registered players – how large do you think that number could become in the future?
All of our games could still reach bigger audiences. But the great thing about this industry is that it’s not like a game of Monopoly where there’s only one winner – there’s always room for multiple games from multiple companies. You can be very successful even if you’re maybe not the biggest within the entire genre. But of course ultimately you have to define a genre in which you’re strong and set out to be the best within it.
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