In recent times, we are growing more confident about HTML5 games (nick named H5 games), a medium that has been growing despite the popularity of large games. The issue with large games is , well, they are super large and that can be a huge factor with users who just want to have some fun time for a few mins. Instant games are a great fit here as they can provide that snackable (not really a word) experience. We have been designing several concepts around H5 games part of our IP strategy. It makes sense too for a small and growing studio like us to rather invest in several smaller titles than larger ones where we can diversify our body of work as much as possible. The law of average has to work - right? With Jio games we have found the format fairly successful as some of our games like Tiny army, Quick Racing, Tuk Tuk Go and the recent title Tank Wars have been doing pretty well having easily a few millions users playing them actively on a daily basis. We never imagined such a solid user base to begin with but as we continued with the road map it actually made sense. For a user from a rural town in India, a Jio phone might just be his or her only device and the games they consume on that could be the only major experience as they might not have a smartphone. This meant a greater opportunity for us to come up with the best possible experience and setting that benchmark! This meant we looked at genres that these users would love to play, that they typically see on higher end phones and could very well have that longing to have similar experiences on their humble phones. We decided we need to create aspirational games for such a platform where they can cooler experiences just like higher end platforms. Its all relative at the end of the day.
Quick Racing - One of our most popular titles on the Jio games store.
This also meant we have to work with the constraints of the device that only sports a humble 512 of memory as opposed to the fancy smart phones that we see carrying several gigs of memory. But looking at some of the old school games that pulled off wonders with just a few KBs or MBs to spare, it would certainly be a shame if we couldn’t with so much more memory. This allowed us to design the experience from the ground up keeping the device performance in mind all along. We have gotten even better with some of our recent games in the works where we are able to extract a lot more from these devices.
Tiny Army - again a title all our users and platforms partners love!
Hyper casual games as one might think can be a great fit for such instant games and such smaller devices. While we largely agree, we also believe the bubble with hyper casual is almost bursting due to the limited or shallow experience they provide and users are also wanting casual/ mid core experience similar to some of the larger format games on Android and iOS platforms. We have been designing our H5 games around casual and mid-core segments where the games themselves are very accessible and has that slightly mature touch so audiences of a broad age group can play and it still allows us to keep the games updated and perform live-ops, something that doesn’t really work with hyper casual games. Games like Tiny Army, Tank Wars , Quick Racing are good examples here carrying that slight serious outlook yet being very accessible and re-playable. We have been constantly finding new ways to push the boundary with such light weight games. One of key areas we have been focusing even with these byte sized games is to keep them updated with new content for users to keep coming back for more. Live-ops is equally critical for new age H5 games and they help establish that LTV (life time value) of a game. For a user who loves playing a game like Quick Racing, they are going to appreciate and love when you give them a cool new car or a motorcycle for free or may be they can unlock it by winning a few races.
Tank Wars - one of our recent releases on the Jio games store that has been raking up quite a number of users.
This is also where we are heavily invested and focused with multiplayer for a lot of our upcoming games. They add a greater dimension to these simple games and make the experience dynamic. Fun, light weight, mid core and multiplayer is a great recipe and we want to serve that up for a wave of new users on many of the emerging platforms that we are focusing on.