“I think a lot of that goes into what platforms people are playing on. “We’ve found there’s a seasonality to the game,” Campo says. “We absolutely benefit from, but we’re not just takers. To last eight years, it still needs to fill a gap for players in their day-to-day lives, and play patterns suggest it’s done that much like any other successful mobile game would. Campo says it’s “always helpful” to have a summer blockbuster movie boosting interest in the game, but the game needs to work when there’s no big cross-marketing tie-in to take advantage of. That’s not to say the game is entirely dependent on the film series to drive results. If this were some other brand or company, I don’t know if we’d get that flexibility and freedom to really delve into aspects and areas of the brand folks feel very guarded about. “They’re mini-stories, but they give us so many different characters, locations, and motivations to just continue to infuse the world with fun and wacky things. “They’ve given us a lot of freedom to create new stories,” Campo says. That’s a huge driver of the success of the game.”Ĭampo is quick to credit the Minions animation studio Illumination, not just in building the series and its progenitor franchise Despicable Me in the first place, but in being flexible and allowing the game’s developers to play with the brand,
“Your advertising is all the billboards and everything else, the zeitgeist of Minions in general, the catchiness and humor, all the qualities that make Despicable Me and the Minions brand so attractive to not just kids but families. “Lately with a lot of the privacy and ad-tracking being scrutinized and the environment of both Apple and Google changing in terms of how players can be approached, the strength of this brand puts us in a very good position to actually reap some benefits from some of those policy changes happening in the industry right now,” Campo notes. While the license has been a boon to the game from day one, Campo believes it’s positioned to become even more so given recent changes in the mobile system that could hurt games more reliant on paid user acquisition. But we’re always testing user acquisition a little bit, but not at scale.” “Almost all the users are organic and come to us naturally. “Thanks to the great success of the brand, there’s almost no user acquisition on this game,” Sadkeyev says. That regular influx of new players is one area where the Minions license has been particularly helpful. “Thanks to the great success of the brand, there’s almost no user acquisition on this game” Keeping the game fresh for the legacy players, the long-term customers we have, but also making sure the new audience has something to look forward to.” For us, we’re serving new players all the time. “We also have to understand that we garner a good amount of new players every week and every month, and cycle through those on an annual basis. “It’s just more of what the players want, and continuously refining that so it’s not the same game two to three years in,” Campo says. In addition to that, the Minions satrs Bob and Stuart were added to the game as new playable characters. That event launched June 2, and challenged players to collect a total of 33 billion in-game bananas in order to unlock the King Bob costume. The game has lost the leaderboard mechanic and the endless running mode has definitely been modified throughout the years, but I think we’re also going back to basics and are at a period where we really understand what our audience is seeking.”Īs with many mobile games, that has meant more content, most cosmetic options (costumes in Minion Rush’s case), and more seasonal events, such as the recent Celebration Event to mark not only the one billion download milestone, but also the eighth anniversary of the game. “But I think as we’ve seen the runner genre evolve in different ways where it’s not always having to be endless, we started adding mission structures to it, giving players more day-to-day activities to accomplish, achievements, things of that nature. “The game started out very simplistic, very ‘Saga’ and maps-based,” Campo says. Speaking with recently, NBC Universal senior games producer Berto Campo and Gameloft Kharkiv general manager Stanislav Sadkeyev talked about how much the game has changed over the years and what they’ve learned managing a licensed mobile game this long after launch.
Minion Rush is a rare licensed mobile game in that the endlessly updated not-quite-endless runner has been around for eight years, racked up one billion downloads, and with another Minions movie, The Rise of Gru, set for release next year, it still appears to have some considerable runway of relevance ahead of it.
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