SmashHit Has Definitely Smashed it

It’s difficult to find a game that becomes an hit and it’s really interesting to see why. What is also difficult is to find the key to make it addictive at the point people are going to waste hours playing with it, simply because they love it. I have never found that game, but I have found a few of them that really got close, such as Flappy Bird. However SmashHit is a game anyone has to try, just for the sake of wasting 5 minutes of your time.

Those five minutes will make you addictive to the game or not. It takes an instant, the perfect music and a combination of features that induces you to think that “this is the game”. I have been thinking it about SmashHit for the past two weeks as long as I saw their user base growing and getting more reviews. The game is available on both iOS and Google Play.

Google has inserted SmashHit in the range of 5M-10M, with more than 459,811 ratings. Success has come for this game and addiction is on the go. The only aim of this game is to smash every single piece of glass in front of you, with a limited number of balls that you can gain by smashing glass. The game uses a progressive model, probably not infinite, but I can’t tell, cause I haven’t finished it. By moving from checkpoint to checkpoint, if you have bought the premium version, you are able to see different scenarios and mix of obstacles that will make your “smashing job” more difficult.

What makes this game a success are the two patterns we have already found in most of the successful games out there. I am talking about “Simplicity” and “Infinity”. The game is simple from a user experience point of view, the only thing the user has to do is tap the screen and direct the balls to smash the glass. There is no reason to use more than two fingers or even move the device while playing this game.

The second big key is Infinity, because the game never ends. Even though the game has an end, the complexity and the challenges that you face, don’t make you finish the game after a couple of hours. I have been playing this game for the last two weeks and still, I can’t go further a checkpoint, why? It gets harder and harder. An alternative to that would be a premium version, which is a good strategy for them, but even a bad one.

People want to challenge themselves in playing games and this is the reason why complex games such as Flappy Bird are successful. If you build a premium version to save checkpoints, you’ll definitely make some money, by tempting those who can’t resist to it, but you will ruin the magic behind a game that takes time to finish.

Further this game takes the simplicity of playing into the complexity of designing it. In terms of graphics and what we see around us, we can easily say that hours have been spent programming and designing it; but the success comes by mixing the user experience and the design, and still keeping the whole game simple. The question now is how far a game can be pushed to. Rovio has been able to build a successful brand, which doesn’t just include a game for smartphones, but t-shirts, gadgets and an idea.

How are these games going to survive? Hits don’t last forever, but add value to your company, which means that people will be already queuing when they will release the next game. What Rovio found was a once in a life time opportunity that doesn’t happen often, even if you get millions of downloads and world wide press coverage, like Flappy Bird.