Wooga’s Vision for Story-Driven Casual Games

Since Wooga was founded in 2009, we’ve learned a lot through both success and failure.

One of our key successes has been Pearl’s Peril, a story-driven hidden-object game we launched in 2013. The game far exceeded our initial expectations with players passionately engaging with Pearl’s world and the characters they met along the way. Now in its fifth year, the game continues to grow.

In 2017, we focused even more keenly on narrative design with the release of June’s Journey. The game has already become one of our biggest titles and, like Pearl before it, attracted a sizeable following of loyal players who are passionate about June’s world. The success of both titles have been clear indicators that story can be a powerful development tool and will play an important role in the future of casual games.

That’s why today we are announcing our goal to become the market leader in developing story-driven casual games. Doing so means enacting several organisational changes, but first I want to touch on the reasons behind this move and why I believe it will enable Wooga to become a market leader.

First and foremost, we believe that story is a fundamental driver of experiences, no matter the genre. Through engaging narratives, characters and worlds people form strong and long-lasting relationships to the games they play. We believe that games driven by strong stories can become an even more positive and memorable part of our players’ lives and create joyful experiences that they look forward to playing everyday.

With Pearl’s Peril and June’s Journey we have developed a high level of expertise in developing episodic story content and delivering that to players on a weekly basis. We are one of only a few developers who have mastered this level of frequent content delivery and have gained a sizeable audience of loyal players who are constantly looking for new games and stories to immerse themselves in. Success means building on this foundation to expand our audience and creating story-driven casual games in multiple genres.

To do this, it is important and necessary that we change our organisational structure. Previously, Wooga has been organised into studios, with each studio responsible for the entire development cycle in one genre. Going forward this will change. We are currently enacting changes that will see us become organised around life cycles and allow teams to focus on and become experts in specific development phases.

These changes mean that we will be parting ways with circa 30 Wooga employees today. This decision was not one we took lightly but is necessary in order to fulfil our ambitions to become a market leader in this segment. Change is always difficult and it is sad to see friends go. We will do our best to support the employees affected as part of this shift in strategy and ensure the transition to the next step in their career is as easy as possible.

While these changes will be difficult, especially in the coming weeks, I believe this new structure will allow us to double down on our key strengths as a developer and define a new, exciting market segment within which Wooga will thrive.