Home » Making video games in Italy, Midnite and that hyper-casual passion

Making video games in Italy, Midnite and that hyper-casual passion

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“Developing hyper-casual games means constantly looking for a new game mechanic, a setting or theme that has not yet been exploited, looking for inspiration between current trends and everyday life”: so he told us David Vignoni, CEO and co-founder of Midnite, an independent studio in Cesena that designs and develops video games for smartphones.

Founded in 2020 by David and Julien Vignoni, the story of Midnite begins as early as 2015, when David was working as a consultant in London and Julien in a building engineering firm in Switzerland. The first game, Numberful, aroused great interest in the public thanks to the promotion received by Apple and Google who highlighted it in their stores: “The idea for Numberful, a game in which numerical sequences have to be found, was given to us by a mutual friend we met in London. He had also prepared a prototype, but we didn’t have fun playing it and we decided to radically modify it. Thus the title was born, a simple game for a challenging challenge, create a sequence of numbers within a grid, the sum of which must correspond to the number of the level “.

The positive experience of Numberful convinced the Vignoni brothers to drop everything and return to Italy to devote themselves to developing video games full time. The great success, however, comes 3 years later with Slices, published by the Turkish publisher Good Job Games, a game that currently has over 60 million installations: “Since 2018, everything has changed a bit, hyper-casual games, the main players in the market, the players themselves and of course also Midnite ”, Vignoni explained to us.

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Midnite headquarters

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The strength of the (not so) little ones
The great success of Ketchapp and Voodoo, developers and publishers of hyper-casual titles, has caused the number of new publishers and consequently of studios and new games available to grow exponentially. The market has begun to become saturated and people have become addicted to this type of games, but hyper-casual has not died out, on the contrary it has evolved by increasingly adopting a model called hybrid-casual. A genre of games, mainly for mobile devices, which combine the simplicity of approach of hyper-casual titles with more advanced features such as card-based updates, advanced equipment systems or social features. Today the biggest difficulty is finding the right idea behind the game, “There is no magic formula, no recipe to follow that guarantees a positive result. Sometimes ideas that look perfect on paper produce disastrous results in tests – this is Vignoni’s reasoning – And then, when you least expect it, a game you thought mediocre makes that Cpi (cost per installation, ed), which makes you jump from the chair “.

The hyper-casual and hybrid-casual video game market is very fast, the studios operating in this sector try out many titles and only a few reach the public, Vignoni explained to us: “We develop almost a hundred prototypes and iterations a year. . Of these, 20% deserve at least one iteration e one per quarter reaches the soft-launch phase. Soft-launch games may or may not go live, it depends on many factors. With the current Midnite team the goal is to publish at least 4 games a year ”.

Hyper-casual games have very different dynamics from published video games for computers and consoles. The market is extremely dynamic and it is necessary to give visibility to the titles: “Promotional campaigns are all digital, within apps, which can also be other games, or via social networks such as Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. The preferred format is the video format, in which clips of the game are shown, funny or provocative situations, in order to whet the curiosity of the viewer ”.

Campaigns within other games happen through specialized ad networks, such as Applovin and IronSource, companies specializing in the development of technologies for the monetization and distribution of mobile apps, but also Facebook and Google are an important source of traffic for publishers in the sector.

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From Italy to the rest of the world
Midnite is based in Cesena, currently the studio occupies an office with 9 workstations, of which only 4 are used regularly: “Our team is international and lavoriamo in remote-first, this means that all communication takes place through online tools and in English. In this way we all remain at the same level of participation, without distinction between those who are in the office and those who are not and without losing transparency or production capacity ”.

Midnite’s latest game is called Get Lucky, released in September 2021 from the French Homa Games, is enjoying great success in the United States, where it has reached the first position of the charts of the most downloaded free games of the App Store and Google Play.

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