Interview about the acquisition of the game Idle King
Wicket Gaming AB (publ) releases an interview with the company's CEO Eric de Basso today, presenting and answering questions about the acquisition of Idle King.
Q&A about Idle King and Motap
How do you think the acquisition fits into Wicket Gaming's overall strategy?
If you look at what Wicket Gaming has said to focus on, that is to work with games and edtech. In games we have one title, Cricket Manager, and now we are adding another game to that branch, it makes sense. Why are we now choosing a casual game? You can just play with the thought; why can't we have an Idle Cricketeer? Sports games don't always have to be deep. Even though we have a deep game now, the next step could just as well be a casual game.
You mentioned that the data for the game looks very promising, what else would you say the game contributes from a shareholder perspective?
What it contributes is very clear, we have a game that is ready and "soft launched", we will take over the assets, we will monetize, balance and push it out and start making money from it immediately. The game has no waiting time.
The follow-up question then becomes why Motap chooses to sell this game, a fully developed game that shows promising KPIs, why should it be sold?
It is important to look at who owns Motap - Ahoiii Games. They have specialized in learning children's apps in the first place, they built Idle King as part of trying to create a slightly more fun game in a learning environment. It is fully focused on its learning apps (edtech) which goes by the name Fiete and has 17 million downloads and 200 thousand organic downloads monthly. What they have done with Idle King is to take some of the input from the learning apps for children and create a casual game.
And then it's like this, what are they actually doing? In my world, it's not like we're acquiring the game. It is rather that they buy into our company. That's actually how I want to see it. We gain very strong knowledge as owners of our company. This means that we will be able to utilize that knowledge when we want to move on to sharpen our edtech segment.
How do you see Wicket collaborating with Motap in the future?
I think it will be closer than ever. After all, Motap is owned by Ahoii and I want to intensify the collaboration with Ahoii. Now we have bought Motap's only IP. What we want to do now is strengthen the collaboration with Ahoii Games who we know are extremely skilled at creating edtech apps. I was down in Germany when we signed the agreement and then met the owners and founders of Ahoii and Motap and we talked about how we can collaborate further. I think that is very important, we get a lot of knowledge and can give back a lot of knowledge.
You also acquire the technology behind Idle King, how do you see it being used within the framework of Wicket Gaming?
What we've looked at when we've done the technical due diligence is how quickly you can scale this up into a new game. The mechanics of the game are already there and are called Idle King today. Why can't you have a light cricket game built on the same platform? An Idle Cricketer? If we are already going to penetrate the Indian cricket market with our main number, Cricket Manager, then we have already found all the people who enjoy cricket, why can't we offer them a casual game of our own and promote it into our game? Manager games are deep and require thought, in this case we have a slightly lighter game that you should play for five to ten minutes a day. It gives the player a lot of joy in a different type of environment.
Link to video interview:
Link to presentation in pdf:
https://linked-dimensions.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Wicket_Gaming_Idle_King_presentation.pdf
Idle King KPIs:
Retention data (Retention: players returning to the game):
Day 1: 36%
Day 3: 14%
Day 7: 6.5%
Day 28: 1.4%
ARPDAU (Average revenue per daily user):
0.10 USD
Top Game Benchmark - Arcade/simulation (Source: GameIntel
The data is latest Q4 Y 2022)
Retention data:
Day 1: 28%
Day 3: 11%
Day 7: 6.5%
Day 28: 1.7%
ARPDAU: 0.04 USD
Link to Idle King - Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.motap.idleking&hl=en&gl=US
Link to Idle King - App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/idle-king-tycoon-tap-games/id1479539390?l=en
Trailer for Idle King:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4P1ptzUYcys
For further information, please contact:
Eric de Basso, CEO, Wicket Gaming AB
E-mail: eric@wicketgaming.com
Phone: +46 70 780 52 00
About Wicket Gaming
Wicket Gaming is a Swedish game development company founded in 2015. The company's business concept is based on developing and distributing so-called free-to-play games in the sports genre based on proprietary brands. Since its inception, the Company has worked to develop its first title, Cricket Manager, which is a manager game in cricket for mobile devices that aims to create and own its own cricket club and compete against other players around the world. The goal is to create one of the world's most popular cricket manager games for mobile devices and to use a technical platform to broaden the game portfolio to include other sports manager games.
For more information, see Wicket Gaming's website www.wicketgaming.com