Hello!
This week’s GOTW is CSR Racing, a smash hit iOS game from Natural Motion.
It was released in June and has been an incredible success: it’s spent most of the past 6 months in the top 10 grossing apps, and has never yet dropped out of the top 20. The game cost $0.5-1m to build, but in August Natural Motion announced that it was generating >$12m gross revenue per month.
How does it work?
VROOM VROOM! Test your drag racing skills on the streets, pimp your ride to go faster and faster, and beat rival drivers to become the top racer in town!
CSR Racing combines racing with resource management. You start with a lowly Mini, and you build up cash by beating slower drivers in the early races. As your bank balance swells, you can hire a mechanic to tune up your vehicle, get upgraded parts (e.g. a more powerful engine or a Fast & Furious-style nitrous oxide booster), and add new cars to your garage.
All those things help you advance through the game by beating progressively tougher opponents. The racing (shown below) requires a quick start, smooth gear shifts, and judicious use of boosters. The aim of the game is to beat rival car crews one by one and emerge as the city’s #1 hot rod. I can tell you now that sh*t’s going to get real when I hit that N2O button.
How does it make money?
CSR Racing is free to download, but there you can spend real money on packs of Cash, the in-game soft currency, and Gold, the in-game hard currency. Cash and Gold can be used to buy boosters, new car types, and a stack of customisations. There’s an interesting strategic aspect to the latter, because different customisations have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the car to which they are applied. For example, upgrading the body of my Mini increases power and decreases weight (= it’ll go faster), but it also reduces grip (= slower starts).
Why is it particularly interesting?
CSR Racing is this week’s GOTW because it’s in the vanguard of a major trend: the introduction of console-quality graphics to mobile games.
Natural Motion have made it clear that this is a deliberate strategy. When almost all new iOS games are free to download, how do you stand out? One way is to offer a game that looks amazing – particularly if it will encourage users to show it off to their friends, and will attract mid-core players who have a propensity to spend more money on games.
High-quality graphics have also helped Natural Motion to agree licence deals with real-world car manufacturers – hence you start with a Mini and can work up to an Audi or BMW. At first this was not easy – premium car brands don’t often licence their brands to free games. But CSR Racing now sells 3x more cars than the global auto industry(!), so licences are easier to come by. Yesterday’s game update contained all–new models from Bentley, Dodge and MacLaren.
Give it a go if you haven’t already, and let me know what you think. And if you’ve missed any of the previous GOTWs, you can find them all on the GOTW website.
All best,
Todd