How Rollic hit 2 billion downloads for its hypercasual games

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Rollic has surpassed two billion lifetime downloads in its portfolio of hypercasual games, or accessible titles you can play in a minute or less.

While hypercasual gaming has had a tough time over the past year, Istanbul-based Rollic has been able to increase its audience and engagement by making more use of live ops, online leaderboards, events seasonal and customizable characters. Rollic has now released 19 games that have reached #1 or #2 on the US App Store.

I spoke with Rollic CEO Burak Vardal who co-founded the company in 2018. Zynga acquired the company in October 2020 for $168 million and then Zynga itself was acquired by Take-Two Interactive this year.

Rollic began adding live services to its titles in 2021 with the launch of the first-ever live online leaderboard in Hair Challenge, the award-winning "Adopt a Pet" ad feature in High Heels, and seasonal holiday events in six of his games. .

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So far in 2022, Rollic has launched 14 games that have ranked in the top 10 most downloaded games on the US App Store, including Car Lot Management, Coffee Stack, Colors Runners, Hoard Master, Crowd Evolution, and Fill Tea. Fridge.

Here is an edited transcript of our interview with Vardal.

Burak Vardal is CEO of Rollic.

GamesBeat: Tell me about your history at Rollic, and the history of Rollic as well. < /p>

Burak Vardal: We co-founded Rollic, two partners and I, in December 2018. It's a fairly young company. We started out as a hypercasual game publisher, and we're still a hypercasual publisher and developer. Since the beginning, we have launched more than 200 titles in total. Last I heard, Rollic surpassed 2 billion downloads worldwide in July. We've launched over 15 titles that have reached #1 on the App Store in the US and around the world.

GamesBeat: How many people are on the team right now?

Vardal: Right now we are 165 people. The whole team is in Istanbul. But of course we work with many third-party developers as a publisher. We have many product managers, game managers, who work on game ideation and production. Then we have developers, artists, and the other traditional game company divisions.

GamesBeat: How much of your portfolio is dedicated to internal development versus external development?

Vardal: Our external development network is huge. Right now about 9...