Forge of Empires celebrates is 5th anniversary. We had a little chat with Armin Busen, Innogames’ CPO, about past , present and future of the browser game.
Forge of Empires celebrates its 5th anniversary this year, first of all, congratulations for this achievement and thanks for this interview. Could you give us any previews on what will happen in FoE during 2017?
Thank you! Forge of Empires is a true success story for the whole company and I’d like to thank the game team for their extraordinary work. When we released Forge of Empires in 2012, we knew that the game had huge potential but we’ve never expected this global hit. This success was only possible due to the high quality of the game and a sustainable business model. In 2016, we released additional content for our players every week and they really enjoyed that. In the future, we will continue working hard on the game and add new features to give our players the best game experience possible. For 2017, we will release the two missing parts of the Oceanic Future, new historic questlines and lots of cool surprises!
Which has been the event, or questline, you’ve enjoyed most creating it in these last five years?
Forge of Empires is a game with a lot of content and cool features. If I would have to choose one specific questline I’d pick our historical questlines. I really like the combination of solving the quests and learning about historical figures like Martin Luther King or Albert Einstein.
Is there any particular episode in these last five years you would like to share with us and with our readers?
The last five years were really exciting for InnoGames and the whole Forge of Empires team. When we first released the game, we knew that the game is fun and has enormous potential. Only eight weeks after the initial launch, we had one million players which was great to see and a huge success for us. So right from the beginning Forge of Empires war extremely successful and stayed like that until now. A very special episode of the game was our transition from browser to cross platform. Pretty early we decided to not launch a separate mobile version, but bring our browser version to mobile so our players could keep their accounts and game progress. This was a great challenge for our team but in the end, we succeeded and delivered high-quality mobile versions for iOS and Android. 2014, when we launched the iOS app, it was one of the top five new strategy titles for iOS. One year later, Google awarded the Android App as “Best of Games 2015” in Germany, France, and the UK.
How did you come up with the idea of FoE? Did you get inspiration from other games of this genre?
After the launch of Tribal Wars in 2003, The West in 2008 and Grepolis in 2009, we felt the need to try something different and develop a city building game that players could enjoy for months or even years. Our goal was to push the limits of a browser game with cutting edge graphics and great playability. Compared to our games Tribal Wars and Grepolis, we wanted to focus on the city building aspect of the game. We saw that some players preferred this focus. This is one of the core game mechanics of those games and while many players love the thrill of Tribal Wars or Grepolis where the focus is much more on competitivity, we wanted to try something different with Forge of Empires. Therefore, we decided that plundering is still possible in Forge of Empires but not mandatory and you can’t lose your entire city due to an attack. Additionally, we really liked the idea of “traveling-through-ages” in games like Civilizations or Age of Empires. We then combined all these game mechanics and ended up with the core gameplay of Forge of Empires.
What is your relationship with history? Is there any particular age you love working with?
I love history and all the various aspects that come with it but I couldn’t say which era I like the most. Therefore, I love it that Forge of Empires allows you to travel through the different ages. As a result, you have the chance to experience all those different times with their special look, technologies, and challenges.
Why did you choose the browser platform instead of making a PC game?
Our first game Tribal Wars started as a hobby project by our three founders Eike, Michael, and Hendrik. No one of them was a professional game developer and the whole project was motivated by the idea of creating a game they would enjoy playing with their friends. After the enormous success of Tribal Wars, they continued developing browser games as the platform offered a large target group with manageable costs. 14 years after the initial launch of Tribal Wars, InnoGames gathered a lot of knowledge and expertise in developing and running browser games. This is one of the reasons why games like Tribal Wars or Grepolis are still on the market and very successful. However, we see the future in mobile games as the market is even bigger and still growing. Therefore, we decided to only focus on mobile only games in the future.
If you could change anything about these last five years of FoE, would you do it? If so, What would you change?
Forge of Empires is one of the most successful strategy games in the world. That said, we’ve apparently done a lot of things right which is great.
But of course, there is always room to improve. Looking back and seeing the enormous success of the mobile versions, we probably should have developed them earlier. The transition from browser to a real cross platform experience was a great challenge for the whole team and we might have underestimated the time and workload the entire process took. On the other side, this challenging phase helps us now in developing mobile-only titles as we gathered lots of knowledge and experiences during that time.
If a new player started approaching the title now, would he be privileged or not compared to older players?
The great thing about Forge of Empires is, that you can decide on your own playing tempo. If you want to enjoy the eras, build up a beautiful city and only fight from time to time you can definitely do that. You don’t have to worry about losing your city or any game progress. This is great for players who don’t have the time to play for hours every day. On the other side, if you’re really into the game and want to rush through the eras as fast as possible you can also do that. Join a guild, find the perfect city layout and try to plunder other players. Forge of Empires offers lots of different play styles for all type of players.
If you could use 3 adjectives to describe the last five years of FoE, which ones would you choose?
Successful, fantastic, fun.
And in the same way, which ones would you choose to describe the game in the future?
Challenging, interesting, surprising.
Forge of Empires it’s available on PC, iOS e Android.
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