[Mobile Games] Why Hutch mixed match 3 with car culture in Forza Customs

[TheWild ™]

 

The latest Forza title is not a racing game – it’s a match 3 puzzler.

Made by UK-based studio Hutch, Forza Customs mixes a casual puzzle core with a car-customising meta that makes for one of the more unexpected licensed games of the year. It all makes perfect sense once CEO Shaun Rutland explains that Hutch is not “attached to a genre, but more attached to an audience.”

To put it another way: Hutch increasingly makes ‘car culture’ games, rather than actual racing games. It signed a deal with Microsoft in early 2020 to explore how Forza could work on mobile, and three years later, the final result is Forza Customs – a puzzle-and-decorate game, essentially.

“If we make a traditional racing game, how can we compete with Forza Horizon? We’re filling a need in a completely different space,” Rutland explains. “And creatively, it’s actually a really exciting problem for us. The options are endless, we really feel innovative – and a lot of people think mobile games aren’t innovative.”

 

“The relationship with Microsoft is really good because both parties were really clear – we’re not making a traditional racing game, like a Forza Horizon on mobile,” he continues. “We went through a number of ideas together to really explore what it could mean and what would be valuable…there are risks, because I do believe the Forza audience expects a racing game, but if you’re on mobile, racing games are really hard and very skill-based. And to make a traditional racing game work on mobile requires hundreds of millions of downloads.”

Match 3 meets car customisation came up early in the testing phase, says Rutland, and it stuck. “We have a process for testing and testing early, and allowing our team to try out all sorts of ideas really quickly. Microsoft were very open to it being in a different kind of space, and it’s been a real joy working with them – and terrifying, because we hero worship them.”

Besides, Hutch already has that action-racing box ticked with Rebel Racing, and has found far greater success away from straight racing games with Top Drives and F1 Clash. The studio was also burned badly by its experience with 2017’s Race Kings.

“That was a really painful experience for us. It was a great game but it was a really bad business,” says Rutland, who notes that the twitch racer was, in the end, not suited to the players that actually pay for content: mostly males over 25 who are not so interested in skill-based play.

 

“We laid a massive bet on Race Kings – we raised some money, put most of our chips on it. And we had a side project called Top Drives which was basically a Top Trumps kind of collectible card game. And in that classic way the universe works, the game that had all the budget failed and the game that had no budget was huge.”

Usually, at this point in the article, there’s some discussion of how the studio is tackling today’s much tougher marketing landscape. But Hutch has a lot of that figured out already, says Rutland.

“Marketers will go: who’s your audience? But we’re clear about our audience and the cohorts and the segments within that audience. We’ve got a really strong marketing team and as part of MTG, that team has got a lot bigger and stronger and more global.”

Hutch has, in the past, done TV advertising to support its performance marketing efforts on Top Drives and F1 Clash, and Rutland says it may do some with Forza Customs, too. “You only do it in support of and by following up with strong targeted marketing,” he says. “Performance marketing has become tougher. I’m not going to brag and say we’ve spent 10s of millions on TV advertising – we’re doing it in the right way and figuring it out.”

 

“Tactics come and go every month,” he continues. “You’ve got to be completely humble and always change. You’ll find something and it’s like you struck oil, and then the well dries up. The strength of our marketing team is that they are always trying new stuff.”

Rutland also pays tribute to Forge of Empires maker InnoGames, which is also owned by MTG. Though the two studios might seem very different, Rutland says it has been invaluable to have the InnoGames team “just a Slack message away” for advice on live ops, marketing and everything else that goes with running a mobile game company.

Next, Hutch is working with NASCAR on a new title, and while of course the studio has worked well with big brands like F1 and Forza, Rutland says it isn’t moving entirely away from creating its own IP. “I want to learn more and move faster,” he adds. “But yeah, I think we want to have a blended approach.”

“We’re a profitable business and I feel very grateful to my team for enabling that, but we can’t take it for granted. It’s a really, really tough time. I don’t know what next year holds for Hutch and my team. We know there’s some really phenomenal competitors out there that are bringing out phenomenal games. The lifeblood of this business is testing new ideas and finding new new products to build.”

https://mobilegamer.biz/why-hutch-mixed-match-3-with-car-culture-in-forza-customs/