Biz Daily: Is Agar.io this year's Flappy Bird?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to Biz daily I'm John Jordan so the news today is that market intelligence company app Annie has been going through its data and looking at the top grossing and most downloaded games across the um Apple App Store and Google play uh store for July 2015 and we've kind of find ourselves in situation where there's a a flappy bird type phenomenon going on so flappy bird famously was the game that kind of came from nowhere was very hard to play very viral um and kind of just exploded in terms of downloads and and for couple of months was was The game everyone was talking about and the game that's kind of done that in in July so the top uh downloaded game on iOS devices for July was one called uh AAR iio I think that's how you say it so say it's AG G A do iio

um I suppose it could be agario or something but I think AAR iio is how we're going to say anyway and that game um is kind of interesting and many it is like um like like Flappy Bird um so it's it's kind of had an existence kind of outside mobile for for for quite a while so it's been pretty successful as a as a as a web browser game a flash game um and people have been playing it on that basis for a long time so here coming to mobile and being success is is not maybe a big surprise um but to go back maybe a step uh the company that's brought it to mobile is uh mini clip so mini clip has been running for a long time um many years almost a decade now has been running a a kind of a browser uh Flash game portal so it's had a lot of very addictive games um have very big audiences don't don't really have monetization in them um but it's built buil very big audience and has slowly been kind of coming over to mobile with

them so the first game it came over to mobile with was uh was Fragger um but that was now about 5 years ago and that's they sold that for 99 cents cuz that's you could do paid games back then um we're now pretty much free to play it's very hard to get buy games um and and AAR IO is is very much a kind of um a very kind of simple experience really so it's a 2d game you you control a a circle that moves around and you eat the other circles that are around you ones that small and new and you eat them you get bigger um and there's lots of other bigger circles around that are trying to eat you so it's a actually normally when I play anyway quite a quick experience I kind of wander around for a bit and then get eaten by something um very high scool driven pretty hard actually um so a bit like the fact thing and quite viral because as soon as you play it you go oh I should have that was a silly mistake to make I should have you know gone the other way or there's a few kind of basically you move you can move your circle around and you can um split it in half and you can kind of um drop kind of

release some or get rid of some um Mass to kind of speed yourself up and St um so so there's a very basic controls but it's just very addictive people get back and play over and over again but so um it's kind of in some ways it's it's no surprise that it's been the most downloaded game on um on iOS I guess iPhone really um for July just very addictive and very viral and has a big fan base already but what's kind of interesting is it has no monetization in it at all so there's no inapp purchases just because as a flash game that wasn't available for for the creators um so so it's kind of come over to mobile without that has um like flppy again has has in in-game advertising but quite how much money mini clip is making from that even though it's a heavily um downloaded game and heavily played game kind of hard to tell probably not that much money and actually is interesting on that point it's the most downloaded game um on iOS during July and it's actually already the sixth most played game in the US on for iPhone and very quickly it's kind of um kind of trans translated its big

download figures into into big active a big active audience um how long that will last for kind of hard to tell Dan Figures were already Dr kind of dropping off in into August they were kind of dropping off quite quite significantly um and kind of a bit like fluffy bird as well people played it and then after a couple of weeks it's like well didn't have much longevity so it' be interesting to see with AAR I whether that longevity can be can be um increased and certainly mini clip is working on putting in monetization so they're working with the games original the original game's Creator to try and put bation in again it' be interesting to see whether the audience for that game um is very I imagine some of them certainly will be quite vocal about it like um having to or having the option to spend money because that wasn't really there in the in the original game and that's not the game they've been playing so quite a difficult scenario really for for um Min clip to kind of try and put monation in a game that doesn't have any at the moment and has a big audience but it's kind of again interesting that we are kind of seeing that because it's so expensive now to to

do user acquisition and get and to get people to install free-to-play games um and then monetize them they actually you know maybe there's a tendency to kind of launch games without much monetization in um in a different way we kind of see this in in um in the vain Glory game which is a a mobile MOBA and that launched with very light monetization and now they've raised a lot of money um to make it into an ort game so they're trying to monetize an audience in a different way not not necessarily directly but maybe through through indirect means and create it as a kind of a standard so much like League of Legends has done on PC they're trying to do that on mobile and I think all these all these moves are reaction into the way that people can't survive it costs $2 or3 to get someone to download a game and you know only maybe two or three or maybe even 1% of them will actually monetize it um then suddenly the the cost you're trying to get out of the people who are monetizing is getting to hundreds of dollars which for some games can be done but OB obviously is difficult so um so so an interesting move I guess it we'll wait and see whether whether that um AAR

iio is a real Flappy Bird at the moment it's kind of um not quite a mass Market meme I suppose it's kind of like a gamer meme we'll see if it kind of crosses over into into the mainstream see if the American chat show host start talking about it which is always seems to be the uh the the Touchstone for when a game has gone mainstream anyway that's the news today come back tomorrow and we'll find out what's going on in the world of mobile games see you then [Applause]