Homa cofounder Olivier Le Bas says reports of hypercasual’s death have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, Homa’s never been in better shape.
“Look at Homa’s results in the first six months of the year – while some some players have completely dropped the hypercasual space, it has brought some amazing opportunities for a player like us,” Le Bas tells us.
“We see even bigger opportunities, and the result is that we’ve never had so many games into the US top 100.”
Dead? No. Changing? Sure. “It’s true that the hypercasual game as it was is evolving,” he continues. “The standards are higher, expectations in terms of real quality and longevity of the experience are higher. And this brings new opportunity, so that’s the one that we are really focusing on as well as diversifying with hybridcasual games.”
We’ve seen the likes of Voodoo, SayGames and Kwalee effectively re-brand as hybridcasual game-makers, but it appears Homa boss Le Bas doesn’t want to get bogged down in all that. Instead he prefers to talk about hypercasual games with better production values and retention. Whether you want to call those hybridcasual games is up to you.
Paris-based Homa was founded by adtech veterans Olivier Le Bas, Daniel Nathan and Juan Jose Mostazo five years ago, and has already raised over $165m in VC funding and has over 220 employees. Its flagship hit is Attack Hole, “the most downloaded game in this space this year,” says Le Bas.
Attack Hole’s revenue split between ads and IAP is around 70/30, says Le Bas, and idle arcade game Fight For America is showing “very strong long term metrics”. It also has high hopes for Merge Army, a game developed by 8sec that will be published by Homa next month.
“The expectations are higher in terms of production quality in order to potentially build longer term products that will help counterbalance the cost of acquisition increase,” says Le Bas.
“That’s what the whole industry, including Homa, has been doing over the last year or two. However something that is different to our competitors is that looking at the financials as well as the number of games that we published, we are constantly growing and constantly increasing the number of games we launch into the market.”
Pre-ATT, Homa games were released with the expectation they’d get under 10% day seven retention and “we were not even looking at day 30,” says Le Bas. “Now we’re we’re trying to reach something like 15% and above for day seven and we make sure that we build an experience even for the users that remain after day 30.”
He adds that Homa Labs, the firm’s publishing platform, is now increasingly designed to help hybridcasual game-makers, and it’ll expand into helping developers publish casual games next.
Homa is also dabbling in blockchain tech, and Le Bas namechecks TikTok and even Nintendo’s Switch as potential destinations for Homa games in the future.
But that’s all a little further out. “Hypercasual and hybrid remain the focus for now while we try to plant seeds for the future into casual,” he adds. “this will come later in the next few years.”
