This isn’t a Christmas miracle (or a Hanukkah one). It’s not a Diwali festivity, even though the heroes of the story are located in Mumbai, India.
This is the story we all want to hear - how working hard and following the metrics brought Firescore Interactive, once again, to the top of the charts with a record-breaking download number of 30 million in less than 8 weeks since Acrylic Nails was published by CrazyLabs in both stores.
A CrazyLabs partner and preferred studio
Firescore Interactive, the hyper-casual studio behind last Christmas’ success Soap Cutting, has been working with CrazyLabs for over a year now. As one of CrazyLabs’ preferred studios, they got one of the first invites to our new CLIK Dashboard right before it was officially launched. Our mutual goal was to go through the CLIK process, step by step, while giving full transparency and self-serve capabilities to Firescore Interactive’s team. We were all waiting to see if yet another viral trend can make the transition to a chart-topping mobile game.
Marketability tests
When we discuss how to create successful hyper-casual games in industry events such as PocketGamer Connect Digital, we always talk about ideation, and how important it is to make sure your hypercasual game idea has an audience.
The idea for Acrylic Nails came originally from CrazyLabs, but it was waiting for the right partner to come to life: enter Firescore Interactive. Since no one really knows upfront whether a certain game idea is going to be a hit or not, the first thing CrazyLabs and Firescore Interactive did was a marketability test - verifying that Acrylic Nails has enough interest in it as an initial prototype, before the team invested more time in the development process. The numbers on the CLIK Dashboard showed there was even more of an interest than we all initially expected:
Retention tests
Once the studio saw the results and the potential, they really started their engines. In most games, at this point, the flow is created and the development process is built for the 2nd phase of testing. With Acrylic Nails, the numbers were quite conclusive. That is why CrazyLabs’ Publishing professionals advised Firescore Interactive to skip not one, but two steps forward, and go directly to testing and releasing an even bigger, more developed version of the game.
Just to clarify: most games will first face another marketability test and retention test, in which the goal is to make sure players are not only interested - but actually playing and willing to continue playing over time. But since Acrylic Nails demonstrated early on such potential, CrazyLabs’ team tapped into the experience they had with another recent #1 hyper-casual game - Tie Dye, and went full speed ahead.
Building on Tie Dye’s success, we were able to provide Firescore Interactive with the needed insights to create the optimised flow for the game. The teams collaborated and focused on crafting a tailor-made game flow, which is one of the few things that can effectively minimise the number of versions needed for testing on the CLIK Dashboard.
Gamification is the key
Finally - let’s talk about gamification. Anyone who has ever played a mobile game, even non-gamers, knows that if the game imitates real-life sensations, it has a better chance to succeed and grab our attention. It’s crucial, and if not done right, players will simply churn.
Since Acrylic Nails was gamifying a very real and popular trend, once it was clear we now have a hit on our hands (pun intended), CrazyLabs’ team worked closely with Firescore Interactive and supported the studio with the infrastructure needed to create a version that can scale.
This included, among others, tech art assistance, game design support, and overall UI/UX for the fully developed version. The joined forces created key features such as the powder art, the stencils, the marble look, and various decorations. These features were all carefully checked first - the CLIK Dashboard enabled Firescore Interactive to test more new features as well as the improved UI, until the design, the flow and the overall experience was an imitation of life.
"Acrylic Nails is indeed a result of a very hard-working and motivated team," confirms Rotem Eldor, CrazyLabs Publishing Manager.
“Game developers sometimes feel as if the initial marketability test is all they need, but the truth is that even with amazing results, a lot of work went into recreating that familiar sensation of building Acrylic Nails in real life. It’s crucial, since without it - it would not have been such a hit.”
“Further to last Christmas’ success, Soap Cutting, we knew early on that the idea for Acrylic Nails, if gamified accurately, may become a huge hit,” recalls Karan Khairajani, Co-Founder at Firescore Interactive.
“The main difference this time around was the CLIK Dashboard, and the ability to get immediate feedback on our game tests. Everyone knows that when it comes to hyper-casual - time is of the essence. You have to work fast, test fast, and if the tests are good - release fast, before anyone else beats you to the punch.
"The transparency in the CLIK Dashboard gave us the overview we needed as well as full control over the process. That, combined with the help from CrazyLabs publishing professionals, enabled us to really speed the development cycle, and release the game faster.”
The CLIK Dashboard is available for preferred studios. If you and your studio are working on a hyper-casual game, you’re invited to apply here. CLIK members can also invite other studios, and if their invitees are accepted - both sides will receive a referral fee of up to $3,000(!).
About CrazyLabs
CrazyLabs is a Top 3 casual and hyper-casual mobile games developer & publisher, with over 3.8 billion downloads for games like "Acrylic Nails", "I Can Paint", "Tie Dye", "ASMR Slicing", "Soap Cutting" and many more. CrazyLabs has offices in Israel, China, Macedonia, Germany, and Ukraine, and has hyper-casual gaming accelerators called CrazyHubs in India and in Israel.
