Top News

#1: Lumi Interactive Raises $6.75 Million

Melbourne-based studio Lumi Interactive recently announced a $6.75M seed investment for its game Kinder World (KW), led by a16z. As its name suggests, KW is not a typical game. It is focused on improving the player’s mental health through research-backed wellness tasks rather than puzzle solving or defeating enemies. Having such an interesting premise, let’s take a deeper look at the game and the studio behind it that aims to “create games that make the world a kinder place.”

Lumi Interactive was founded by Christina Chen and Lauren Clinnick. Prior to that, Clinnick ran a marketing consulting firm while Chen headed a company that provided data analytics solutions for indie game developers. The road for KW actually began with Clinnick’s marketing firm, Lumi Consulting. While initially focused on PR and marketing, it started experimenting with game development in mid-2018 with a state-government-funded game called Faraway Tea, which never saw release. By the end of 2018, Clinnick shut down the marketing division and pivoted entirely to the gaming sector, releasing Critter Clash in 2019 as Lumi Interactive. Critter Clash was not a success and the app has been pulled from both app stores.

In mid-2019, Lumi Interactive announced that they were working on Faraway Tea again, but all mention of the game ceased in early 2020 in the midst of Melbourne’s harsh lockdown to combat the pandemic. It is likely then that the studio pivoted Faraway Tea into KW, as according to this post, KW was created as a response to the difficulties faced in 2020. The concept art of Faraway Tea (seen below) shows a similar lo-fi vibe as KW, and the last posts on the game’s Facebook page show prototypes of a body-positivity-type of tarot game. This lo-fi vibe and the wellness aspects of the tarot game have now become the signature features of KW. In addition to that, the logo of the government body that funded Faraway Tea also appears on the splash screen for Kinder World.

In any case, information about the game first surfaced in KW’s Discord server around November 2020. This was followed by a successful Kickstarter campaign in early 2021, with almost 2,000 backers contributing about $67,000 to support the development of the game.

So what is KW about? According to Lumi Interactive, it is “built with evidence-backed self-care activities at its (sic) core, designed to improve the mental health and wellbeing of our growing player community.”

Having played it, it’s not so much a game as a social-enabled plant-tamagotchi. Players look after a plant by watering it several times a day and “enriching” the water by performing wellness-related tasks such as writing a Daily Gratitude message. Another activity called Emotional Naming allows you to create sand art in a jar full of sand colored according to your named emotion. You are also able to see other people’s sand jars and what has shaped their emotions.

Currently, monetization is based entirely on purchasing additional pots as well as pot customizations (called “artist pots”). Buying a featured artist pot will award you with a free second pot which you can gift to a stranger.

As of right now, KW is in alpha and has too few downloads for Sensor Tower to generate any data, but according to this post by Galileo Ventures, one of the participants in the seed funding round, Kinder World has amassed 70k downloads and over 90k AUD in revenue.

The funding of KW and Lumi Interactive is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it is a record amount for a female-led studio in Australia, and second, KW doesn’t fit into any established genre. Being a hybrid of a wellness app and a game, there are no gachas, battle passes, and no precedent for modeling the economy. As such, it represents a risk for its investors but one they obviously see potential in. It will be interesting to see how Lumi Interactive makes use of its new funds and how it plans to scale up its userbase and make KW more than just a niche product.

#2: Newzoo Consumer Trends Report

Insights and analytics firm Newzoo has compiled a new consumer insights report that investigates how people are engaging with games. With a sample size of almost 76,000 players across 36 countries, it gives us a snapshot of how people across the globe are interacting with games and game-related media. I’ll be sharing some of the most interesting findings in this article, but you may access the full report from Newzoo here.

The younger a person is, the more they choose games as their source of entertainment

The chart below shows the split of entertainment media among different age-based cohorts (Gen Alpha is defined as people born 2010 or later). It shows a clear trend of younger people prioritizing gaming and interacting with game-related entertainment such as watching streams/videos and socializing in gaming communities. Another interesting pattern to note is that social network use has been increasing inversely with age up until Gen Alpha, where it actually started reducing. This could be due to the fact that young people are choosing to socialize in game platforms like Roblox instead of traditional social media platforms.

Engaging with games means more than just playing games

Besides just playing games, people also watched game-related videos and streams, listened to gaming podcasts, socialized in gaming communities, and even attended real-world gaming conventions. The younger someone was, the more likely that they would be consuming all the different types of gaming content.

Many people are entering game worlds just to socialize

Game worlds are the new town square, where people congregate just to chat and connect. 44% of the people surveyed weren’t even playing the game as much as using it as a means to get together with their friends. It’s unfortunate that Newzoo did not reveal more here as it would have been useful to know which games were more likely to be used as socializing platforms, as well as the cohorts that were more likely to use them.

In summary, games have become very important for people around the world as a form of entertainment as well as a platform for socializing — particularly for the young. We don’t need to look for the metaverse far into the future. It’s already here.

Game Launch Radar

#1: Disney Mirrorverse

• Publisher: Kabam Games
• State: Launch
• Territories: Global
• Classification: Midcore – RPG – Action RPG

• Quick thoughts:

  • The game features characters from Disney and Pixar, like Sulley from Monsters Inc fighting alongside Mulan. Overall, it’s a slick coat of Disney paint over standard mobile ARPG mechanics. You control movement and attacks and trigger special moves while progressing in wave-based levels.
  • It’s been in soft launch for more than two years, initially in the Philippines and then opening up in other territories like Canada and Italy. Such a long soft-launch period is reminiscent of Brawl Stars’ soft launch and may indicate that the game was not initially performing to expectations. Similar to Brawl Stars, the gameplay has changed a bit since it was first released. A look at gameplay videos when it was first soft-launched shows that it had more of a top-down camera angle, and characters moved and attacked automatically versus the direct control in the current game.

#2: Road To Valor: Empires

• Publisher: Dreamotion
• State: Launch
• Territories: Global
• Classification: Midcore – Strategy – Tactical Battler

• Quick thoughts:

  • This is essentially Clash Royale with a different skin, although there is some innovation in that you can summon hero units called Guardians who have their own special abilities.
  • Road To Valor: Empires (RTVE) is a sequel to their previous game Road To Valor: World War II which featured the same gameplay but with a WWII theme. RTVE is centered around a fantasy theme with mythical heroes like Beowulf and Odin.
  • Dreamotion is a subsidiary of Krafton Games and also created Ronin: Last Samurai, which was heavily inspired by From Software’s Sekiro.

Other Game Announcements

• Diablo Immortal is delayed in China, causing Netease stock to fall. Link
• Apex Legends Mobile earns $11.6 million in its first month of release. Link
• PUBG Mobile plans to start including assists in calculating a player’s post-game performance. Link
• Popular PC tactics game Into The Breach will be coming to mobile, courtesy of Netflix. Link
• Apex Legends spins up new servers and reduces the number of bots in games. Link
• Words With Friends 2 adds Clubs, their version of guilds. Link
• Upcoming cross-platform RTS, Era of Conquest, will enter closed beta testing in mid-July. Link
• SuperPlanet’s ARPG Dungeon of Gods reaches 1 million downloads. Link
• Top War: Battle Game’s collaboration with Transformers helps it break its daily revenue record. Link

Company Announcements

• Miniclip acquires Sybo Games, creators of Subway Surfers. Link
• A Sensor Tower report shows that ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, earned $1 billion in mobile game revenue in the last year. Link
• Nordcurrent, developers of the casual cooking game Cooking Fever, grew by 20% in 2021. Link
• Supercell reveals a partnership with PC-exclusive studio Channel37. Link
• Bombay Play appoints former COO of YOOZOO Games as Chief Operating Officer. Link
• Tencent is rumored to be working on an extended reality device. Link
• Tripledot Studios, creators of Woodoku, is one of the fastest-growing private companies in the UK. Link
• Chinese game studio XD, developers of Ragnarok Mobile and app platform TapTap.io, prioritizes growth in the US. Link

Ecosystem Announcements

• According to Data.ai, mobile gamers are set to spend $21 billion in Q2. Link
• Canadian company Parallelz raises $3 million for its streaming tech that allows browsers to play any mobile game or app. Link
• Meta, Playstation, Epic, Microsoft, and more form the Metaverse Standards Forum. Link
• Layer launches a marketplace to match IP holders and game developers. Link
• Cloudfeather Games raises a $1.25 million seed round for new monetization toolkits. Link
• Activision Blizzard‘s 10 directors, including CEO Bobby Kotick, have been re-elected to the board by its shareholders. Link
• Chinese game market was down by 7% in May. Link
• Ubisoft CEO, Yves Guillemot, takes a pay cut due to the company’s financial under-performance. Link

Content Worth Consuming

• Surviving The Mobile Marketing Winter (MobileDevMemo): “Marketing teams must establish new measurement baselines, or reliable models of advertising and product economics, as the broader commercial environment changes. ROAS models that are mostly informed by COVID-era data cannot be trusted; the same is true of cohort forecasts.” Link
• What Supercell Learned After 10 Years of Hay Day Updates (MobileGamer.biz): “The Derby is a community leaderboard feature that incentivizes players to work together in their neighborhoods to complete a set of weekly tasks. And its effect was not only felt among players – it eased the pressure on the content production team, too. “A social feature like that can work on its own without us feeling the pressure of always having to provide more and more content,” says Demirdjian. “If it’s a production machine or new crop, players reach it, it’s great, but the appetite for something new after that comes relatively quickly. But with a new social feature, it has its own loop where I think it occupies you for way longer than a simple content update.” Link.
• Late Game Lessons of Live Service Design (GameDeveloper): “A popular approach that many third-generation mobile games have added is a “roguelike” mode — where players have to complete objectives with randomly chosen rewards and encounters. New systems have to bring with them new gameplay potential, you can’t just release a new monetization aspect and call it a day. With Dragon Ball Legends and Azur Lane, they both have introduced a new higher tier to their gachas. Games like Punishing Grey Raven and Arknights release new chapters and have added in new gameplay modes that aren’t in their global versions yet.” Link