It’s harder than ever to launch a new game, but that’s not stopping Snake Rivals maker Supersolid.
After a decade in mobile, over 100m downloads across its portfolio and the launch of its sixth major title Cook & Merge, Supersolid is accelerating its release slate significantly. The London studio has another title soft launching this year, a second game closing in on beta and a third entering production soon after a hiring round.
So what’s changed? After almost ten years of steady growth, Supersolid recently split its 65-strong team into two – one dedicated to live game production and another specifically for new game prototyping.
“We’re constantly developing new concepts, testing them very early, setting in place very clear milestones, with greenlight processes that teams can assess themselves,” Supersolid CEO Ed Chin tells us. “And so it takes a bit longer, but we’re being a lot more robust in terms of what we’re developing and the metrics that come out of that.”
The new games team works on a loose monthly cycle of concepting, doing marketing tests, then taking the most promising projects and quietly releasing early first playables to test for metrics.
Cook & Merge, released this week, is the first Supersolid game to have gone through this new process and come out the other side. “It was one of many concepts – that’s what’s taken the time since Snake Rivals [released in 2019],” says Chin. “It has a bigger team on it, has more resources and has taken more time. But as a result, it has the best metrics we’ve ever seen in all of our games. We’re starting to see the fruits of that change in development.”
Merge is a hot market with a multitude of big, well-funded contenders, but Supersolid still sees opportunity in the genre with Cook & Merge’s pacier, more varied progression and a focus on live ops. Players will jazz up smaller, more focused restaurant scenes, and weekly cooperative team events will task players with hitting targets by working together.
“This kind of social element hasn’t been in the first generation of merge games,” says Chin. “And also this social, competitive element – there’ll be the full gamut of events going from single player through to team versus team.”
Ten years into making mobile games at a steady pace, the ex-Playfish team heading up Supersolid certainly aren’t afraid to enter new territory. The studio’s portfolio already spans multiple genres, from infinite runners to builders to life sims and now merge. And its next title “is a very different genre, a bit more for a male audience,” adds Chin, who expects another title to be in beta by the end of the year.
