SYBO Games soft launches 'Train Riders' officially in Belgium, Netherlands, Canada and the Philippines.
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/73209/ ... in-riders/
I'm not really sure why they are launching a near 1:1 version of Subways Surfers with a difference only in name and AppIcon (not as strong and visually appealing as the original imho).
Update: The UI seems to be a different iteration. Visually it seems a bit more messy though.
Did they somehow buy back some rights. But not the title from KILOO. To finally have 100% control?
Or is it some sort of hacky way of expanding the game? (Shouldn't be needed).
One theory that could make a whole lot of sense. Is that Train Riders is an experimental branch of Subway Surfers. Where they test out new things. Like larger new features they are just too sensitive to test in the real game. That could eventually make it's way into the main game if performing well enough.
But let's see if more official information surfaces on what the purpose of Train Riders really is.
Also didn't KILOO earlier publish Subway Surfers from their Store front accounts? Now most things (Apple AppStore and GooglePlay) resides with SYBO Games. I may suspect a sort of deal was made if that was the case. But this is pure speculation.
Amazon still has KILOO listed as publisher. And a web version on their website.
Another thing on the two. Neither KILOO or SYBO has yet managed to pull off a real success after their massive global Subway Surfers success.
Only a single direct release from SYBO has seen the light of day, Blades of Brim. It was fairly quickly put in hibernation (or minimal support is a better word). It has done quite well judging on downloads alone. 5M+ on Android alone (probably closer to 10M end?). That's more than most developers can dream of. But even at that it didn't seem to live up to expectations.
Also doing runners is an especially hard category to master. It is among the least monetizing categories out there. Subway Surfers is among the exceptions to the rule. But mostly due to the massive scale of their user base.
Development of new titles seems to be still very active within the SYBO walls. But never really launching anything.
KILOO has gone down a different route. With a rapid expansion of development resources. And quite quickly launching a handful of games. Internally developed and co-productions. But nothing that suck around for long. Also they didn't seem to do too well at crafting a meta-game and going down the whole F2P route in general.
The conclusion was that all internal development has been completely shut down years ago.
And now (in games) they seem to be focused on building their html5 web game portfolio (
www.kiloo.com) from a host of different sources. Including Funday Factory's Bullet League. As their new, potential, main thing besides (not super actively promoting on SoMe) Subway Surfers. But perhaps still doing some back-end support business-as-usual I guess.
I would say it's probably a good idea business wise for KILOO to tap into that new web portal area also. Even though their existing Subway Surfers community on eg. Facebook is not super happy about it. With hashtags of #bringkilooback with every SoMe update. They are far from the only company providing web portals for games. But I suspect it might work pretty well for them with proper analytics and user acquisition tactics. At least they stand a fair chance.
Though with the amount of money (like hundred$$ and hundred$$ of million$$$) both companies has made. I'm not 'super impressed' by their ability to turn it into something valuable (in mobile games development specifically) beyond Subway Surfers support for almost 8 years. Which is great and all and should be a core focus. Both companies has also been investing time and effort in other areas. It's unclear how things has turned out there.
So I guess... Even with all the money in the world. Doing games is still hard!
A lesson worth remembering.
I know things hasn't always been easy between them. But things seems to indicate an age where they are drifting more apart as companies.
The fat lady hasn't sung yet. And it will be interesting to compare strategy for the two companies in the years to come.