Why no-one kept up with Kim Kardashian: Hollywood
Glu’s celebrity tie-ins showed us that mobile games can reach huge, entirely new player bases – if you have the right game at the right time.
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For a short period in the mid-2010s, celebrities and musicians were beating down Glu’s door to replicate the success of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.
Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj all tried and ultimately failed, though Gordon Ramsay’s game did okay. Kanye West pitched Glu several games, we’re told, and Jason Statham, Sly Stallone and Vin Diesel all wanted a piece of the action too, though none of those titles ever saw the light of day.
The reason the ones that actually launched flopped was simple, says then-Glu boss Niccolo De Masi: those other celebrities were phoning it in, while Kim Kardashian had fully committed to turning her life into one long live operations event.
As De Masi noted, those pop stars do not live their lives out in public like Kim does. And people don’t care as much about the minutiae of Taylor Swift’s life as much as her music, he said.
He and Kardashian effectively created a whole new category of game, he added, and he’s right. But influencer culture has evolved since then, and you don’t need a videogame to make money from your followers any more.
And so the era of the celebrity game is over. And yet you can’t deny that today’s mobile games business could do with some of the glamour and dynamism of that time.
Indeed, it might all come back around again, says De Masi. ‘Glu 2.0’ has been on his mind lately, and maybe he’ll convince Kim herself to get involved in whatever’s next for him.
You may scoff, but I think Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is a really important game. It shows us that mobile games can reach people who would never, ever consider themselves gamers, and that is mobile’s greatest strength.
While the PC and console business continues to make more and more games for the same audiences, over here on mobile there’s so much more potential for another genre-busting game like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to come along at any moment. It just needs a canny developer to bottle that lightning when it strikes.
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