Voodoo continues to change its business strategy by reducing the number of games released during the year.
In an interview with the press, Voodoo’s vice president, Alvaro Duarte said Voodoo will now be much more selective in releasing games instead of massively like before.
Vice President Alvaro Duarte gave an interview.
Duarte recalls that lately Voodoo is not interested in working with hyper-normal projects but with deeper and more complex hybrid-normal projects. By changing its approach, the company had to rethink its attitude towards the number of games released. Right now, it only plans to publish about four games a year, which will have to go through a lot of stress tests first.
To give you an idea of the scale of change, according to AppMagic. Voodoo published 62 titles by 2022. Hyper-casual game publisher Voodoo became the third largest company in terms of downloads since it was on the App Store.
Voodoo also wants to separate from the casual genre, does not want to be forced and wants to expand more game genres. The company is currently working to build new game technology to enter the field of “play for money” mobile games. On top of that, the company is expected to surpass $500 million in sales this year, a growth of 700% over the past 5 years.
Voodoo was founded in 2013 by Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter. The two have been friends since high school and previously founded Studio Cadet in 2012, a services company for websites and mobile apps.
King’s former vice president joined Voodoo over two years ago and has since helped transform the company from a high-volume hypercasual game studio into a #1 quality publisher. Duarte told us : “Almost no one at Voodoo is working on hypercasual games anymore. We have completely transformed our team into a new genre that has great appeal to players and I think such bold changes are still needed.”
Collect Em All is one of Voodoo’s most profitable games.
Apple’s new rules regarding IDFA make Voodoo’s business model much more difficult. “So that’s why we say casual is no longer a good fit for us… There are a lot of companies still trying to pursue this, but we feel that this is not the future. more,” said the representative.
Voodoo’s five most downloaded games, according to Appmagic: Helix Jump (499 million), Aquapark.io (364 million), Paper.io 2 (333 million), Hole.io (273 million), Crowd City (254 million visits).
Duarte told us that change means Voodoo has been “completely reorganized” over the past two years. There are currently two main teams: a release team that continuously tests, prototypes, and develops new hybrid gameplay mechanics, and a live team that develops existing games by adding meta features and more in-depth content.
