How did Azur Games get past 10 Billion installs 😱?
And how is their newly launched Hybrid casual title, Slime Castle scaling past $30K IAP a day? We got to talk to 🎮Sergey Marcinkiewicz, a Publishing Manager and head of Studio 😎.
Sergey shared a lot 💡 about some of the unique strategies of Azur, such as launching Hyper casual (Not Hybrid!) games with a focus on long-term Roas and retention targets. Games that were rejected by other publishers were successfully scaled in Azur’s portfolio 📈. Because of this “flexible” publishing strategy, Azur got an edge in different than “mainstream” markets.
Slime Castle, which is published by Azur is actually developed by RedTail Games, a developer from China. It is a very clever iteration of Doodle Magic, (the rogue-lite tower defense without a road) which we talked about during our Christmas prophecy 🎄, that we will see a Western iteration of this core gameplay soon.
Both the meta and the core have significant iterations. The monsters now attack sideways from the left to the right on a free plain. Instead of roguelite skill choice the game uses a speed-up version of idle RPG progression, where the player upgrades all the different parameters with a temporary currency given for killing monsters.
This resets every run, but it is also upgradable outside of the gameplay. Therefore the stats gradually start from higher and higher base with every run moving the player throughout the chapters. There are also features from Legend of Slime and of course a streamlined Habby Gacha setup 😅. Thanks again 🎮Sergey for coming on the pod and sharing a truckload of useful info 👍. Join us as we talk about all of this with Felix and then more Felix as he takes the UA hat from Matej 🦩 this time 😁.
