Perfect World to develop and publish “core” mobile titles, aiming for 20% success ratio at the start

By Stephany Nunneley

Perfect World Entertainment has announced its getting into mobile games development and publishing, and is aiming for a 20% success ratio. The firm said it plans to focus on the core audience, by looking to create or publish action-RPG, strategy, trading card, MMORPG, and MOBA games.

According to an interview with GI International, the GM for Perfect World’s new division – former DeNA West director of marketing – Fabien-Pierre Nicolas said the teams are aiming for a “10-20% success rate in games.” The reason for such a low percentage starting off, is that event with the firm’s experience behind the move, there’s no “guarantee that you’ll be successful if you publish in this space.”

“I think unpredictability is really not a lottery, but it’s different between entertainment,” Nicolas said. “So you see a 5-10% hit rate even though you have a lot of the right elements in place. But 5-10% is better than 1%.

“The worst that could happen for gamers as well as us as a company is to try and go all out and publish 100 games in one year. I did that in the past. Because in that case, you don’t have enough time to pay attention to your gamers, your community. And you can’t pay enough attention to the studios and give each game enough attention or support. Which pretty much guarantees those products won’t do well.”

Perfect World is starting off small by releasing just four titles at first: Arena of Heroes – and MOBA from Sneaky Games; Bombuds – a turn-based multiplayer title from Fugazo; Elemental Kingdoms – the trading card game from iFree Studio; and The Null Society – and adventure-RPG from Agent Disco.

Nicolas believes the company’s focus on core gamers will help when it comes to cross-promoting its mobile titles with its larger, PC and console audiences.