Crossy Road Stands Tall Over Other Free-to-Play Game Apps
The mobile game that broke the mold for free-to-play games is also a lot of fun.
by Rich Watson
Crossy Road is one of the few mobile video games for which I feel any affinity. The design is deceptively simple, the gameplay even simpler.
For someone who grew up with eighties arcade games and still identifies with them, it feels like the right kind of transition to twenty-first-century gaming.
Hipster Whale
The game originated with the Australian video game developer Hipster Whale. Co-founder Matt Hall worked at a couple of Australian developer companies before going independent. He had made three successful games, then suffered a dry spell.
Then, in 2014, Hall met Andy Sum at a local developer conference. They formed HW. Crossy was their first game. They released it for free that same year on Apple’s iOS App Store. In 2016, after the success of the online version, they developed an arcade cabinet edition.
Free-to-play games and Crossy Road
Most game apps charge some kind of fee in order to play. Free-to-play games come as either:
“Shareware,” in which the game starts off free for a limited time before charging a fee to continue playing, or
“Freemium,” in which you’re encouraged to buy in-app virtual goods that enhance the playing experience.
Advertising is also a revenue stream for free-to-play games.
According to a 2016 interview with Hall and Sum, Crossy was always meant to be free. They also wanted a game players would stick with for as long as possible.
They looked at monetization models in other games. Then they took Crossy and minimized the ad experience as much as possible without making players pay to continue playing:
Matt: We knew video ads would work as long as people wanted to click them for some reason, so we had that nugget [of an idea] there.
Andy: And I’ve been playing a lot of Dota 2, which has purchases in it, and they’re only cosmetic, and don’t affect the game at all. So we had this skin idea—different character ideas—that didn’t change the game at all, so we had lots of different influences in it for this.
Matt: We really wanted to make sure it was a pure experience. And that it was the most—the number one goal was retention. Having people play and not wanting to leave for any reason. So we took the bare minimum approach with monetisation and advertising.
The means to pay to play exists within the game, but most players choose not to use it. The company name, Hipster Whale, is an ironic use of the online slang for someone who spends lots of money on online transactions.
Crossy earned over $10 million after its first three months, with over fifty million downloads. Hall has said he and Sum have rejected offers from companies to hunt for “whales.”
Gameplay, characters and screens
Crossy plays much like Frogger. The player simply moves the character across busy highways, railroad tracks, and rivers with flowing logs. You can play solo or head-to-head. In a “Pecking Order” mode, you can compete for the high score of the day with players from around the world.
Crossy is endless. There’s no ultimate goal except to not die. You can die from getting hit by a vehicle or train, or from drowning in a river.
You start with the feature character, the Chicken (you know: the one who crossed the road to get to the other side). Many others are available for purchase by collecting in-game coins.
Some characters are original. Others are inspired by pop culture. Still others are inspired by internet memes. You can buy a Piggy Bank character with real cash to acquire in-game coins faster.
Many variant characters appear on variant screens. The format is essentially the same but the elements change:
double-decker buses for a UK screen,
safari buses for an African savanna screen,
fish instead of cars for an underwater screen,
asteroids instead of cars for an outer space screen,
pumpkins and bats for a Halloween-themed screen, etc.
At the height of the pandemic, HW created an “at-home” variant screen set in a house. It has wheeled chairs, vacuum cleaners and Roombas instead of cars. It uses “characters” such as a toaster, slippers, and a cat in a box!
Artist Ben Weatherall uses a colorful, retro-ish 8-bit design on Crossy, adding to its distinctive feel.
Playing Crossy Road
When I first played mobile games, features like collecting coins, “skins” (variant characters or other in-game acquisitions such as wardrobe changes), and especially the endless-game format was off-putting. I wasn’t accustomed to such things, nor did I see much use to them.
I expect them now, thanks in large part to Crossy. I’ve stuck with it longer than any other game I’ve played. It’s fun, but also the ads are less intrusive than other games.
The look of the game is clever. The Pecking Order mode reminds me of competing for high scores in arcade games. Variant characters and the twists they bring to the screens are often funny. For example: one is a parody of action movie heroes. Jet planes fly overhead and explosions happen all around. Another is an octogenarian; she moves by contorting into athletic poses like someone a quarter her age.
Other Hipster Whale games
HW created two Crossy spin-offs:
Disney Crossy Road, featuring classic and modern Disney characters, and
Crossy Road Castle, where original Crossy characters compete in a multiplayer cooperative game.
In addition, HW has Pac-Man 256, where the original Pac-Man concept is expanded to an endless maze, and two originals: Shooty Skies and Piffle.
Crossy Road remains their greatest success, in large part because it doesn’t encourage real-cash payments:
“Freemium was a surprise, right? I’m sure it caught everyone by surprise,” Hall said. “But there’s a lot of thought that went into it. There’s a lot of my own wrestling with that concept. I really like games the way they were. Crossy Road, I think, feels a lot like a premium game, in a weird way.”
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