You might expect a panel on big mistakes within the games industry to be littered with stories of botched releases or games canned during development.
Speaking during the Free2Play Summit in London, however, Zynga UK general manager Matthew Wiggins said titles that manages to be a surprise success (scoring millions of downloads in the process) can prove to be just as damaging as an outright failure.
Panel beater
Wiggins' tale of his former studio Wonderland's struggle to cope with the wealth of interest in iOS smash GodFinger dominated the four man panel talk, which also featured Relentless Software co-founder Andrew Eades, PapayaMobile evangelist Oscar Clarke and Jami Laes, VP of global studios as Playfish.
According to Wiggins, Wonderland had put in place plenty of strategies should GodFinger fail to take off. It hadn't considered what it would do if it proved to be a big hit, however.
"We didn't plan for success. That was our mistake," said Wiggins, claiming GodFinger had been in development for years pre-release, like a console title.
"I had loads of plans ready to go if the game failed, but we had absolutely no content to deliver to our eager users when the game hit #1 on the App Store."
A real Wonderland
Such additional content, Wiggins contested, is crucial for free-to-play releases, but it's arguably even trickier to get right than actually handling the development and launch of the game in question in the first place.
"If you can't deliver new content, you break the faith players have in your ability to run the game," he concluded.
Zynga went on to acquire Wonderland in April 2011, rebranding the outift Zynga Mobile UK in the process.
It was a transition labelled as "smooth" by Wiggins, who said the deal had been a "dream" for a studio with the respective limited resources Wonderland boasted at the time.
News
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font.
Related Articles
News
Feb 13th, 2024
Mobile revenue exceeds Take-Two’s expectations, making over $2 billion in nine months
Top Stories
Feature
May 17th, 2024
New release roundup: The best new mobile games from a battle royale to a console classic remake
Feature
May 16th, 2024
Behind the scenes: How adding sandwich offers to an idle merge game boosted three metrics at once
Events
Digital Dragons | Europe | May 19th |
GamesBeat Summit 2024 | North America | May 20th |
Mobidictum Meetup Tallinn May 2024 | Europe | May 21st |
Nordic Game Spring 2024 | Nordic | May 21st |
Impact 2024 - Indie Games | May 23rd | |
Morocco Gaming Expo | Africa | May 24th |
MomoCon 2024 | North America | May 24th |
Unreal Fest Gold Coast 2024 | Australasia | May 29th |
Popular Stories
Feature
May 14th, 2024
53 top mobile games in soft launch: Squad Busters, Battle Guys: Royale, Plants vs. Zombies 3, LEGO Hill Climb Adventures, and more
Feature
May 13th, 2024
Hot Five: Dubai's new Gaming Visa, April's mobile game charts, and Xbox studio closures
Interview
May 13th, 2024