Hunters wasn’t a failure, according to Zynga CEO
Star Wars: Hunters, the mobile, PC, and Nintendo Switch live-service action shooter that saw players take on enemy teams in multiplayer battles, isn’t thought of as a failure by publisher Zynga.
That’s according to the company’s CEO who – in a conversation with The Game Business – spoke about what worked and what didn’t in the short-lived live-service title. “We built a great tech base and a fun game,” said Zynga CEO Frank D. Gibeau. “The problem was it wasn’t a viable business. We weren’t able to generate the organic installs from the license.”
“We had some issues with how we could explore the intellectual property. Could you play Darth Vader or could you not? That sort of thing,” Gibeau continued. “We ended up with a cross-platform game on Switch and mobile that ran perfectly. It was fun. But it didn’t engage over the long term. And it wasn’t a viable business.”
Yet Gibeau believes that these moments are more opportunities for the studio to learn, and he doesn’t really consider them failures. “It’s very difficult to get new products out on mobile in a successful way. You’re going to have a lot of misses and you have to have a strong stomach and a culture for learning that oriented to: ‘hey, it missed. Why did it miss? Why don’t we try this instead?’ For every game that doesn’t reach its full potential, we go back, post-mortem it, figure out what went right, what went wrong on the team, on the tech, on the go-to-market. Any number of reasons. And then we apply that and share that learning across the company,” he said.
