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"It didn't become Cut the Rope, but still millions and millions of people bought it, and they liked it." #Cut the rope downloads androidIts Pudding Monsters game launched on iOS and Android in December 2012 as a £1.49 paid title for iOS, with a choice of free and paid versions on Android.Īs with Rovio's Amazing Alex, ZeptoLab's Pudding Monsters was watched eagerly by the mobile games industry to see if the company could repeat its core brand's success with brand new IP.Īnd? "We launched it in December, and haven't spent any money buying traffic," says Lyalin. ZeptoLab is also doing non-Cut the Rope games. That doesn't mean we're not going to do free-to-play games though." "The paid market might be very small compared to the free-to-play market – right now it's 30% – but that's still huge if we can take a big part of this market. "Not all games can be free-to-play, which people forget," he says. Lyalin says the company prefers to chart its own course rather than be pressured into going freemium all the way. Some Cut the Rope games are free to play, but others are paid. 80% of everything we do we distribute for free, because we just want people to play." It's going to zero, no doubt about that, and we're not stupid. 'There's gold? Let's run there!' With free-to-play, of course, the trend is there. Lyalin spots my question coming a mile off. This, at a time when free-to-play is all the rage in the mobile games industry, and when a number of commentators are comparing Rovio's $199m of revenues for the whole of 2012 to freemium-focused Supercell's $179m in just the first quarter of 2013, or Japanese F2P developer GungHo's $101m in February 2013 alone. #Cut the rope downloads for androidAs one of two new Cut the Rope games planned for release in 2013, Time Travel is notably a paid game – under 70p for Android and iPhone, and £1.99 on iPad. One area where ZeptoLab surely can't avoid thinking about money is the pricing strategy for its games, though. Misha Lyalin, talking at the London launch of Cut the Rope: Time Travel "We just think about what would be interesting and cool from a gaming point of view and a story point of view." ![]() "It could be 'We need to make a farming game, and we need to put Om Nom in there, and by the way he has a girlfriend'," says Lyalin. How? He describes a vision of the company as a "top-down" entity where senior management makes decisions on new games based on what seems most likely to be lucrative. This approach may be suiting ZeptoLab well as the company continues building the Cut the Rope brand, with Lyalin admitting that "if we'd listened to everything we had been told by a lot of different people, we'd be a very different company by now". Lyalin has been friendly both times I've met him, but he's also plain-speaking – unafraid to challenge the assumptions behind a poorly thought-out question, or criticise an industry trend he disagrees with. ![]() In this market, you can build a very big mobile game, but building a bigger brand requires enormous effort." #Cut the rope downloads download"For Om Nom Stories, we have tens of millions of people watching, together with the hundreds of millions of people who download our games. "In Time Travel, the story is going to become a little bit more apparent, although we're not in a hurry to tell this," says Lyalin. That has meant a subtle shift towards creating more of a backstory for Om Nom, through the games, the YouTube videos and through a Cut the Rope comic, which is also available digitally. "We've found the new way: on mobile devices, wait until you can capture people's attention in a big way, and then think about how you deliver content." #Cut the rope downloads tv"We firmly believe that the new way to deliver brands that people recognise in the future will not necessarily be through big movies or TV series," says Lyalin. Tweaks include two monsters to feed on every level rather than one, while players can also watch animated Om Nom Stories cartoons, drawn from ZeptoLab's YouTube channel (70m views and counting). Cut the Rope: Time Travel is available on iOS and Android, and offers a similar physics-puzzles formula to its predecessors as its hero Om Nom goes back in time to meet his ancestors. #Cut the rope downloads seriesThe latest game in the series should fuel more growth. For comparison, Angry Birds is now past 1.7bn downloads and ended 2012 with 263m monthly active players, while Outfit7's Talking Friends apps have reached 800m downloads and 170m monthly active users, although they're more virtual pets than games.Ĭut the Rope hasn't quite reached those levels, but it's on the way: since October 2012 when Lyalin spoke at the MIPCOM conference in Cannes, Cut the Rope has added 50m downloads and 10m active players. ![]()
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