How Seriously won a YouTube award, did Dawn of Titans launch too late, and why Fire Emblem Heroes is going Japan-first

The hottest articles of last week

• 5 Hi-Rez talks its biggest mobile game yet in SMITE Rivals, eSports and building a community

  

  Hi-Rez is perhaps best known for its PC and console MOBA SMITE, which is now making the leap to mobile in the form of SMITE Rivals.
  

  But why exactly did they decide to go after the CCG/MOBA market on a platform they don't have much experience on? We asked Lead Designer Brian Grayson to find out.

  "The way gamers interact on every different platform is surprisingly different. So people on PC, maybe they're really tuned into Facebook. Then you go to mobile and they're tuned into Twitter, actually, because you have the frictionless ability to click and find [games] in the App Store," he noted.

  "We just kind of jumped into it and it's been fun ever since."

  
  

• 4 How Seriously won YouTube Ad of the Year with 'Don't Download Best Fiends' campaign

  

  Seriously is well known for its influencer campaigns for its Best Fiends series of games, and now its only gone and won an award for one of its ad campaigns.

  YouTube awarded the ad campaign known as "Don't Download Best Fiends" as one of its Ads of the Year in 2016, so we spoke to its SVP of Brand & Marketing Philip Hickey about what it takes to make an award-winning ad.

  "A lot of fans were posting in the Best Fiends community warning others to not download the game because it’s fun and quite addictive," said Hickey on the inspiration for the ad.

  As for casting, he told us that "Kate Walsh resonates well with our audience and is well known for her role on Grey’s Anatomy where she played a doctor, so she was a great fit for the role in 'Don’t Download Best Fiends'".

  
  

• 3 How YoYo Games aims to make GameMaker Studio 2 more accessible than ever

  

  GameMaker has become one of the biggest development tools for indies in recent years, thanks to its drag-and-drop code and incredible ability to be played around with by experienced coders.

  You wouldn't think they'd need to make it any more accessible than it already is, but that's exactly what YoYo Games is planning to do with its upcoming GameMaker Studio 2.

  "Accessibility has always been one of GameMaker’s strong points, it was very important to us not to lose this key strength when designing GameMaker Studio 2," said YoYo Games' Patrick Kelly.

  Part of this new level of accessibility is adding a layer-based level editor, as well as improved tiling tools, level inheritance and reduced runtime sizes on mobile.

  
  

• 2 Were the 21 months Dawn of Titans spent in soft launch a waste of time?

  

  Dawn of Titans spent 21 months in soft launch before its worldwide release, a timespan unrivalled by any other game released on mobile so far.

  But, as Jon Jordan asks, were those many months well spent or was it all just a waste of time on a game that should've launched much earlier?

  By looking at the stats, it appears that the time was well spent, as it managed to land high up in the top grossing ranks even in countries that it had already soft-launched in.

  But as Jordan writes, "we have to consider the additional cost of running the Dawn of Titans’ dev and live ops teams between May and December, and the six months of revenue Zynga would have generated had it launched the game earlier".

  
  

• 1 Why Nintendo has taken a Japan-first approach with Fire Emblem Heroes

  

  Fire Emblem Heroes looks like it could be a huge hit for Nintendo and DeNA - not least because it seems as though they've scrapped Super Mario Run's payment model for a more traditional F2P affair.

  But why exactly would Nintendo make this shift, which is targeted more at the Japanese market? Jon Jordan has a few thoughts on the matter.

  The main feature that targets Japan is the aggressive gacha mechanic, which will see players summon heroes by consuming orbs either bought or collected in the game.

  "How easy it is to collect the type and number of orbs to summon the highest level heroes, how frequently they drop and how important those heroes are to making progress in the game will be the mark of how aggressively Nintendo and DeNA are targeting the Japanese top grossing charts," writes Jordan.