Draw Something came, saw, conquered and is now losing players in the millions. What does this quick decline mean for the life cycle of new apps today?
Draw Something is a rare phenomenon, the kind of game that comes out of nowhere and explodes overnight. It’s no secret that many studios want to create the next Angry Birds, but there is no bullet-proof formula that can assure this level of success.
Launching on the 17th of December 2011, Draw Something quickly took the App Store by storm, hitting a sweet 50 million downloads in just under two months on sale. Good times indeed.
It seemed as if Omgpop’s sketch-a-thon was destined to be an unshakable force in the app market, but after the property was sold to Zynga for a cool $180 million, player numbers began dropping at an alarming rate.
From the outside looking in, Zynga’s acquisition seemed to be a premature one, as Draw Something’s active players dropped from 14.3 million to 10.4 million between April and May. But to be fair, it still boasts the kind of player base many developers would kill for.
Market aggregator AppData now estimates that Draw Something is losing some 700,000 active users a week. Could it be that people have quite simply played Draw Something to death? App developer Tiger Style may have the simple answer.
At the start of May, Tiger Style - developer of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and recent release Waking Mars – publicly released graphs outlining the sale trends of both of its flagship titles.
Spider was a decent game, but suffered as soon as it left the App Store front page.Both graphs show a massive spike following launch on Apple’s recommended channel, but then plummet to a near-flat line they simply haven’t recovered from.
The trend echoes the sharp decline in Draw Something players. When Tiger Style’s games were sidelined from the recommended page, the shift resulted in a sharp decline in sales. They were – in a manner of speaking – swept under the rug to be forgotten about.
This paved the way for other fads to roll in for their five minutes of fame, only to suffer the same fate. This production line mentality seems borne out of just how easy it is for studio to sell games on the App Store.
With so many developers throwing their chips into the pot, it’s only natural that gridlock should occur. Give people too much and they will become indecisive, unsure of which game to devote all of their dwindling time to, unless of course, the best choice is shoved right in front of their face by Apple.
Additionally, unless an app has the identity and financial backing to grab the public, or spin off into a lucrative transmedia franchise, it will likely suffer the same fate as thousands of apps before it. Being sold on the App Store isn’t enough anymore - you need top billing to stand out.
Draw Something’s success may be fleeting, and no amount of sponsored words or intrusive Facebook reminders will make the disengaged masses return. Zynga needs to rethink what it is about the game that captured the hearts and minds of so many at launch and meet that need head-on.
There are only so many times you can draw the word ‘hand’ before it gets tiresome, after all.
