A New Era of Self-Publishing
Wednesday, 5th of June 2024, 12:21 +02:00
Early this year, Palworld was released and took the world by storm. Its overnight success set records left and right. It became the biggest third-party game launch ever on Xbox Game Pass and the biggest craze in the monster taming genre since Pokémon Go. What makes this story even more special is that Palworld's developer, Pocketpair, is an independent studio that released Palworld without a big marketing budget. And Pocketpair is not alone; already in 2023 and 2024, we've seen a pretty clear uptick in self-published hits. What is going on? With a current estimate of 19 million Steam sales at about $30 a pop, Palworld easily crossed the threshold of $400M in gross revenue on thi...
The 4X Evolution of Century Games
Sunday, 3rd of March 2024, 17:36 +01:00
No, this is not a repost of Naavik's Frozen City deconstruction from last year, but it is about another Century Games hit that tasks players to survive in a frozen environment: Whiteout Survival. Both games look very much alike, especially during the first sessions. If you're thinking there's something fishy going on with this likeness, you are not wrong! We'll be venturing into the 4X subgenre as a whole as well, so put on your snow boots and we'll get cracking! The Next Big Thing in 4X Whiteout Survival (WS) is a 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate) game with an added Team Battler core mechanic. Unlike other 4X games like Rise of Kingdoms, which provides free-form base-bui...
Dave the Diver: Nexon's Approach to "Fun First"
Friday, 1st of December 2023, 15:21 +01:00
MintRocket was publicly announced as a sub-brand of Nexon in May 2022. A few months later, in October, the studio released Dave the Diver (DtD) in Early Access. Nine months after that, the game launched globally, at the end of June this year. Since then, it has sold more than 1.7M units and received generous critical acclaim. It topped the global Steam charts for two weeks after its release and reached 1M unique players 10 days after its global launch. VGChartz summarizes the game as a mix of the following: An adventure, RPG, management hybrid Casual combat and gathering gameplay with rogue-like elements Eccentric characters with a lighthearted narrative A beautiful sea environmen...
The Evolution of Hybridcasual
Wednesday, 4th of October 2023, 09:21 +02:00
In January 2019 a notorious article predicted that the then-booming hypercasual genre would eventually become unsustainable. More than a year later, Apple announced IDFA deprecation. The fallout has kept a few of us here at Naavik busy all the way through 2020 and 2021. The clearest way out, especially for the most established hypercasual companies, became hybridcasual. Now that the dust has settled -although Unity's new pricing scheme could form a new challenge- there is more clarity around the strategies of the companies that chose this path; a perfect time to look at their best practices. Firstly: what is hybridcasual? Homa Games defines hybridcasual games as "maintaining the ...
Mighty DOOMed: How DOOM's Mobile Spinoff Misstepped
Tuesday, 25th of July 2023, 20:21 +02:00
Alpha Dog Games, a Nova Scotia-based game studio and subsidiary of ZeniMax Media, is the developer behind Mighty Doom, the only mobile-first rendition leveraging the famous DOOM IP, which turns 30 years old later this year. The title is Alpha Dog's first game within the Bethesda and ZeniMax family — and therefore also within Microsoft, which acquired ZeniMax in 2020 at a time when $7.5 billion was still an "eye-watering" amount of money. The History of Doom Let's start off this short history lesson of Doom on mobile with a fun fact. Believe it or not, the first mobile iteration of Doom (as discovered a year ago) was an RPG built for cell phones that "might be old enough to vote if i...
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