Wei Zhang, Founder of Megatouch, talked about the experience of collaborating with Supersonic and overcoming the challenges of making Giant Wanted a chart-topper.

The early prototype challenged the teams to reduce CPI and improve in-game metrics. Supersonic and Megatouch showed perseverance and improvements that helped the game take the top #1 on Android and #3 on iOS. 

I started my gaming career working at SupertapX, one of China’s first hyper-casual game development studios. While I was there, we published Tappy Shots, which was a huge success and proved that the Chinese market was ready for hyper-casual games. After seeing that hyper-casual games could become extensive and profitable hits in China, I was inspired to start my own studio. Since Megatouch’s inception, our team has grown to 15 people and produced 3 hyper-casual games.

Wei Zhang, Founder of Megatouch

The concept for Giant Wanted came to the developers during a team brainstorming session. Initially, they discussed a new shooter with the ability to shoot through walls at close range. Then one of the programmers came up with the idea of adding a giant that could be shot through walls and buildings – the whole team was excited about the concept.

Megatouch built a prototype and tested it with Supersonic – it had the following metrics:

  • $0.41 CPI
  • 13% D1 retention
  • Playtime 250 seconds D0

Working closely with the entire team, the teams focused on lowering CPI while increasing in-game stats, particularly retention.

In an early version of the game, the user was aiming in giants when the camera was rotated horizontally – the creative based on this gameplay had a CPI of $1, much higher than the $0.41 they started with.

Supersonic’s creative team suggested using successful creatives from top games in the gameplay. 

A sniper was shown killing a giant, and we used this to inform our build by having the user play as a sniper and shoot giants using similar images and camera angles. Since we’ve created hyper-casual shooters in the past, we decided to apply our abilities to Giant Wanted. 

Wei Zhang, Founder of Megatouch

The developers wanted to improve key performance indicators further, so the Supersonic team examined user metrics and saw a high dropout rate between levels. Load time and UI issues were the culprits. Combined with improvements, smoothing gameplay based on the above analysis helped improve user interaction, which improved in-game metrics.

Developers then focused on A/B testing to make final optimizations before global release. For example, Megatouch made the shot cinematic, which increased D1 retention to 29%.

Improvements in gameplay, interface, and A/B tests helped Giant Wanted achieve the following figures on iOS:

  • CPI: $0.29
  • D1 retention: 37.8%
  • D7 retention: 7.3%
  • D0 Game Time: 1060 sec

As CPI was low enough to scale affordably and retention was well above 13% of the original prototype, we were ready to monetize and launch globally. The game quickly climbed the charts, finishing first on Android and third on iOS.

Wei Zhang, Founder of Megatouch

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