Alloha Factory aims to be a global hyper-casual game company.
Mobile games require a lot of development time and resources for manpower such as development, design, and sound, making them content that costs a lot to develop. However, most games are free to download, so how do developers recoup their development costs and generate profits? Of course, many games generate significant revenue by monetizing in-game content purchases, but many games also heavily rely on advertising revenue.
Alloha Factory CEO Lee Ho-jin explained that the hyper-casual genre's interstitial ads (mid-game ads) market has grown significantly worldwide since 2018, moving away from the traditional reward-based ad model. Alloha Factory has been specializing in developing and publishing hyper-casual games while paying attention to these changing advertising markets.
By releasing hyper-casual games such as Block Puzzle 1010! and Draw Hammer, which were selected for Google Featured and received a lot of attention from overseas gamers, Alloha Factory has accumulated global know-how. Based on this experience, they released Kiss in Public in August 2021, which took advantage of the hyper-casual genre's characteristics. Kiss in Public achieved 4 million downloads in just two months after its release and became the number one arcade game and the third overall game in the US Google Play Store, receiving great popularity overseas.
CEO Lee Ho-jin focused on developing games that anyone can easily play and targeting the global market, moving away from the competition-centered domestic game market. He believed that if they had expertise in popular games for global users, they could differentiate themselves from numerous domestic game companies. As a differentiated studio, they aimed to secure excellent domestic talent and ultimately develop games that are loved by the most people worldwide.
This mission of Alloha Factory is also actively inspiring and involving employees within the company. Alloha Factory's Blockbuster Studio Kang Gun-woo PM stated that he wants to create games that provide deep and diverse enjoyment, so people can play them for a long time and remember them.
"Hype-casual games take a part of the various pleasures that the medium of 'games' can deliver and create an independent game. We explored various fun aspects by developing about 150 prototypes and aimed to develop more three-dimensional games by combining fun from various games that have been in several games."
CEO Lee Ho-jin said, "There is a tendency to think that game development is too difficult and only thinks big. Still, the birth of the hyper-casual genre has greatly lowered the entry barriers for game development." He added, "Merely creating a lot of content does not necessarily deliver fun to gamers. Therefore, we focus on the most fundamental aspects to concentrate on the most primitive fun and help the team find its own color through it." He expressed his ambition.