Zynga’s Dawn of Titans is set to be a strategy game that will turn massive fantasy battles into an experience you can play when you have a minute to kill.
Zynga has had a tough time of it lately. The gaming company became a household name with the sudden rise of Facebook gaming a few years ago but since then have struggled to adapt their brand to mobile gaming.
Their big hit Farmville spread like wildfire a few years ago and that allowed the company to grow and release more titles. Zynga spent 2011 and 2012 snapping up the studios behind smartphone sensations like Words With Friends and Draw Something, and even hired former Xbox chief Don Mattrick as its CEO. All of these changes couldn’t get them back on track, but a new epic strategy game just might…
Zynga’s focus on mobile gaming hasn’t paid of in recent times. Zynga lost $226 million in 2014, and a year ago was forced to cut 15 percent of its workforce. “It has taken us some time to transform our business,” Mattrick admitted during a recent investors call.
Their saving grace though might lie in one of the acquisitions they made over the years. In early 2014 the company purchased NaturalMotion, the studio behind mobile hits like the charming Clumsy Ninja and CSR Racing, a game that at one point was making an estimated $12 million per month. The developer has been quiet since then, but recently unveiled its first post-Zynga project called “Dawn of Titans”
Dawn of Titans is setup to be a strategy game that aims to turn massive fantasy battles into an experience you can play when you have a minute to kill. It‘s a game that could prove hugely important for the new, mobile-focused Zynga, but for NaturalMotion CEO Torsten Reil, it started simply as a technical challenge. “We asked ourselves, “˜Can you create these big battle scenes, with thousands of people, all in real time, all controlled with a swipe of your finger?‘”
The game is set in a far flung fantasy world where the titans lead armies of thousands into epic battles. It takes huge Lord-of-the-Rings type battle scenes and turns them into a mobile game. Players build kingdoms through victories which in turns gives them larger armies and more powerful hero titans. There will be a single player element but the key focus of the game will be to battle other players online.
The game will be streamlines that you can pick it up and play for 3-5 minutes and then log off. Mobile gamers these days don’t have 30 or even 10 minutes to spend playing games. Dawn of Titans will be free to download and future in-game purchases. This concerns me a bit, hopefully you can progress in the game without needing to spend cash.
The exact release date of the game is not known but will be available in 2015.
Source: TheVerge
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