Interview

MoMinis' Eyal Rabinovich on doubling the length of Ninja Chicken's user sessions

Adding extra Ooga Booga

MoMinis' Eyal Rabinovich on doubling the length of Ninja Chicken's user sessions
Israeli start up MoMinis continues to demonstrate its ability to push games through its Android-focused platform.

Following on the ten million downloads of its signature free game Ninja Chicken, the sequel has clocked up over 2 million downloads in two weeks.

We caught up with VP of marketing Eyal Rabinovich to find how the company is building a business, both in terms of its games and as platform (with 1 million daily active users) for third parties.

Pocket Gamer: Ninja Chicken has always been MoMinis' most successful game, so what was the thinking behind releasing a new game in the shape of Ninja Chicken Ooga Booga?

Eyal Rabinovich: Ninja Chicken was downloaded by 10 million users and received great reviews and rating from our players.

So the main idea was to give our existing users more of what they love: new worlds, stages, obstacles, features, enemies and most importantly - more of Ninja Chicken.

The second goal was to expose more players to the brand, which was successfully achieved with over 2 million users playing the game in the first two weeks after the launch - 80 percent of whom are new players.

How does the game improve on the original experience?

Ninja Chicken Ooga Booga maintains the same fun-to-play and easy-to-learn experience, while providing more variety that starts in the very early stages of the game.

We've added a new stars-mode on top of the old and familiar mission mode, a mini game at the end of each level, and challenging obstacles like teleport, omega, tribal dogs and more.

How did you drive distribution for the game through your platform?

We drive distribution to our games by integrating them into our Games Network, which includes:


  • PlayScape - our own game channel.

  • Gamified cross promotion - a uniform cross-game experience which is created by enabling experience points and virtual currency accumulated in one game to be completely transferable to any game.

  • Standard cross promotion - a variety of marketing capabilities that allow us to drive traffic from one game in our network to the other.


Have you seen any differences in terms of user activity and monetisation compared to the original game?

From a distribution point of view, Ninja Chicken Ooga Booga is our first game that reached the top 30 games list in the US in less than two weeks.

We've also increased user session length and frequency by 50 percent, which greatly improved our advertisements revenue. Ninja Chicken Ooga Booga with virtual goods will be launched next week, so hopefully it will bear even more good news.

What other plans do you have in terms of Ninja Chicken games?

Let's just say that Ninja Chicken and some of his friends in MoMinis are preparing for the Olympics. That's all we can say at the moment.

How can other developers gain access to your platform and what advantages do you think it offers over other competing platforms?

MoMinis is one of the few companies that provides a solution for game development and distribution.

The MoMinis Studio is a free, easy-to-use development environment that allows developers to easily and efficiently create games that run on any Android device - without the need to test it manually - in weeks not months.

You can check out more about MoMinis Studio via its website, and download Ninja Chicken Ooga Booga here.
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.