Both Worldwide Global and Million Victories raised money this week, with the French Million Victories announcing a whopping $40M raise (in this economy!). Its title, Million Lords, was a highly innovative attempt at modernizing many 4x mechanics by removing base building entirely and centering the game around combat. It’s also a great exercise on how system design ultimately shapes player behavior.
In this case, the primary way to become more powerful was to level up, which required XP, which required combat. Other mechanics, like world map bounties, kept the bloodbath going. Another combat-focused mechanic was the ability to respond to enemy marches with a reinforcement that could only be deployed in the window of the march. The game explored strong (but now standard) 4x price points with content that other games are still hesitant to try, such as ALL Legendary Gold and Army items at $700+ points (web store).
For its part, Kingdom Maker, which was published by Scopely and developed by Global Worldwide, reintroduced sex into 4X (also some humor). Why can’t you create dynasties? It was a fascinating game thesis that lent itself to a literal game title.
However, the mobile market runs on highly observable and reactive margins. With marketing now consuming 50% of budgets, the gains from optimization are literally halved, while surprisingly, content innovation is also less. Both of these games had some fascinating ideas, but ultimately, if you don’t have a way to connect that to genre economics, it’s hard to scale.
