Donald Trump's influence on mobile games, Age of Empires: World Domination canned, and how does The Trail monetise?

The hottest articles of last week

• 1 How does Peter Molyneux's The Trail monetise?

  

  There's something about Peter Molyneux's excitement for his games - even when he's vastly overselling them to the point that you know it won't meet his dreams - that's very captivating.

  So when we heard absolutely nothing about 22cans' latest, The Trail, until it soft-launched out of nowhere and globally launched with no fanfare, we had a lot of questions - especially about how it monetised.

  Our IAP Inspector dug into the game to find out more, and found that the game had gone with a user experience first, monetisation later approach.

  "The Trail is at its core a fairly regular free-to-play game - its only differences being omissions, rather than any positive new additions," wrote our Features Editor Matt Suckley.

  
  

• 2 UPDATE: Age of Empires: World Domination canned after 11 months in soft launch

  

  Sometimes games get cancelled while still in soft launch. Either they're not performing well enough monetisation-wise, or they're simply not retaining users.

  Whatever the reason, it happens, and it's happened to KLab Global's Age of Empires: World Domination after 11 months of release, largely in the Middle East.

  The game's servers will shut down at the end of November. IAPs have been disabled, and players won't receive any additional currencies as an apology, as has become customary in canned soft launch games.

  KLab Global are also "not at liberty to discuss" the reason why the game is shutting down, so outside of our guesswork, there's no way to know why exactly the game is closing.

  
  

• 3 Is Donald Trump a winner for games developers?

  

  The bitter Presidential campaign is over, and Republican candidate Donald Trump won out over the Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.

  As ridiculous as the campaign may have been, it provided excellent fodder for developers to jump on and make games about - but were any of them successful?

  In short - no. We looked at three of the top games and found that, despite strong initial downloads, the games had a hard time cracking the top grossing ranks.

  The only real money-maker studied was a social casino game, Slots: Trump vs. Hillary Clinton Slots Games Free, which somehow broke the top 100 grossing charts for casino games.

  
  

• 4 Backflip Studios on releasing DragonVale World five years after the original

  

  Five years ago, DragonVale launched and became a long-running success. It saw a full year in the top grossing charts, and managed 40 million downloads in its lifetime.

  Fast-forward to November 3rd, and developer Backflip Studios has released a new 3D version of the game, DragonVale World. But how will it survive so long after the first game was launched?

  "We have spent a lot of time updating the DragonVale World gameplay experience to embrace the way people want to play, which means a rich social layer that is a tonne of fun," said Creative Director Matt Coohill.

  He went on to tell us about lessons learned from the original game, and how they have shaped the way the studio will operate the game in the future.

  
  

• 5 7 influencer marketing tips for mobile games publishers

  

  Influencer marketing is a pretty great idea if you've only got a small budget and want to reach a wide audience, without going through the usual UA channels.

  But how do you avoid the influencer mocking your game, backing out of a contract, or just outright failing to help your game? Georg Broxtermann of GameInfluencer has a few tips for that.

  He suggests avoiding going for just the biggest stars, working together with the influencer closely, but giving them enough freedom to do and say what they want.

  "Let the influencers do what they think is best," he said. "There’s a reason why they command a million of fans and you don't."