Kano

Arcade action in your pocket.

Classic arcade meets mobile

KANO is a fast action, colour matching mobile game where players have to match colours for as long as possible to stop the volcano erupting.

Skillful throws, spins, catches and tilts are requires to will help you get best scores and beat friends.

700K downloads
1.4M sessions
Biggest market: China (58%)
7.8 minutes played on average, per session

App Store Google Play

Experimenting with revenue and payment models

KANO was designed primarily as an experiment for us to test out assumptions around player retention, payment models and growth hacking.

It was clear that the freemium game market was booming, but could we create something that was free but also felt non-exploitative?

The idea of an arcade style mechanic made a lot of sense. As a free player you 3 lives to spend on game sessions. Once the lives are spent they would all replenish after a few hours, with payment or by watching ads.

We had a lot of downloads, but players weren’t converting into paid customers. Something had to change.

With this knowledge we looked at where and how players were falling off and growth hacked the experience. With minor changes there was instantly an uptick in game sessions.

A second round of growth hacking added winnable hats at certain points in the game, this further increased player retention. Making smart incremental decisions based on analytics data really helped us understand the player experience and bring more value to each game session.

Even though our initial predictions were wrong, responding quickly with intelligent, data lead changes secured a stronger fanbase for KANO players.

Learnings from KANO will of course make there way into future game projects. The purpose of making our own content is to bravely ask questions in an ever shifting gaming landscape.

Unexpected Markets

Localisation is an important part of making games that could potentially span different cultures and languages. As a free arcade style game the breadth of markets KANO could cover was limited only by which languages it was localised into. For the first time KANO was localised into Asian languages including Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean and Japanese.

KANO experienced its biggest success in China overall with 58% of all downloads coming from the region. The App Store editorial team in Hong Kong and China decided to feature KANO on launch which helped us gain an incredible new fanbase.