Week in Views – Squad Busters goes global, broken app stores | Pocket Gamer.biz

Squad Busters is out now! Supercell finally launches a new game

Squad Busters is finally here – Supercell’s “love letter” to the IP that’s made it billions of dollars, its first launch in five and a half years, and only its sixth ever global release.

There’s a lot riding on this one. From a revenue perspective, Brawl Stars’ enormous surge in player spending might give the company a much-needed growth story this year. 

From a reputation angle, anything less than a mega hit will raise questions over whether Supercell still has the secret sauce that has seen it release hit after hit.

We won’t know how well it’s really doing for a good few months yet. Supercell can manufacture early success to a certain degree through its enormous community and invest heavily in marketing and UA. Just like it’s done with its all-star cast in the Squad Busters trailer featuring Chris Hemsworth, Christina Ricci, Ken Jeong, Will Arnett and Aulii Cravalho.

A failure might have onlookers saying Supercell is past its best, or it should have kept Squad Busters in soft launch longer (what’s the rush?). 

Even a medium-sized hit by the studio’s standards – which most other developers would love to have – will still raise questions about the company’s famed (and changing) culture.

So it really needs a blockbuster to maintain its shine. The pressure is on!

Mobile’s broken app store discoverability

It’s what we’ve all suspected (and watched slowly happen in all kinds of places over the years) but today’s app stores are now experts at delivering precisely what you DON’T want.

While Netflix offering you movies merely based on what you were actually looking for (should you directly search for something it doesn’t have) can grudgingly be perceived as the service at least ‘trying to be helpful’, bumping the exact inescapable thing that you searched for on an app store down to fourth in the rankings feels like a cheap trick by shysters.

But that’s the routine minor misery we all endure every day on our chosen ‘favourite’ app delivery platform. Not a surprise really, considering the fact that – for all its tech and outward benevolence – Google is an ads company and the lure of the moolah will ALWAYS come before doing the right thing for its users. But for holier-than-thou Apple to do the same? Shame on you.

And it’s a tricky road to tread. By taking the easy dollar being flung in their faces (by devs and publishers who recognise the random, impossible-to-conquer bunfight that all app stores have become) the app store giants are literally, knowingly delivering what you didn’t want. And for services that live or die by the quality of their user experience, that’s a risky game to play.

How many WTF search experiences does the layman have to endure before they at least begin to ponder whether the grass is greener (or at least less hungry) elsewhere?

The short version is that app search is in dire need of a clean up – both morally and technically.

So how about using all that AI we keep hearing about to serve up genuinely user-useful suggestions based on previous choices? And perhaps charging a sensible fee to these lucky alternatives should they be downloaded? Or just be up front and have ‘Featured’ sections that let your ad clients pay for something that users can at least understand?

BUT – best and most importantly of all – how about when your user searches for precisely what they want… You just give it to them? Wouldn’t that be great?

YouTube Playables are out now with over 75 games available 

Last September, we found out that YouTube’s staff had access to the platform’s new Playables as they tested the service. Fast-forward to today and Playables are available to every YouTube user with an account… So that’s practically everyone, right?

YouTube is the latest player in this trend. We’ve seen games on Facebook for years, and even LinkedIn has jumped on the bandwagon by adding games to its platform. It’s clear that having games is officially ‘a thing’.

But besides it being cool to have games on your platform, I can’t say I’m seeing a massive point to Playables.

I’m not saying that YouTube adding games is a bad thing; it’s more games for everyone, and with over 75 already on there, they’ve given us plenty to choose from. But given that everyone has a YouTube account it’s debatable as to how many extra users they’re going to attract. 

So with the games not being monetised directly it’s purely a play to keep people on YouTube for longer and, therefore, likely to see more ads. At least one positive is that Playables represents a quick way to play some (very simple) games without having to download them.

Overall though I’m not too sure how much of a ‘hit’ YouTube Playables will prove to be or what the goal of having them is outside of being able to say “We have games now” actually is. It’ll be interesting to see the stats in a year’s time telling us how much time people are actually playing Playables.

Lego Hill Climb Adventures launches today, jumping 3D hurdles in Lego worlds

The classic physics-based driving game is back, and this time in 3D with a shiny new coat of paint! Or perhaps coat of bricks?… Either way, developer Fingersoft have landed a deal with Lego to bring a new entry to the Hill Climb Racing series in the form of Lego Hill Climb Adventures, and it looks a spectacular blend of the old and new.

After two billion combined downloads for the franchise, of course, the physics-based gameplay remains, but building and smashing Lego bricks adds a freshness to the formula with even the skies not out of reach; aerial manoeuverability has never been so easy, with Lego propellers to build and attach to vehicles, or jet boosters, or… Whatever will they come up with next?

Bill the hill climber makes his return in Lego form too, and this time around he has not only hills to surmount, but deep caves and fantastical Lego worlds to explore too, all in newly kitted out vehicles, naturally.

It’s a welcome return for one of my personal favourites and it’s great to see the franchise looking and playing better than ever.