Pony Friends was a huge hit, and it sold over a million copies worldwide. So Hall took the picture of the smiling girl and her horse and printed out dozens of copies and gave one to everyone on the development team to help them understand the target market. “A rich girl who owns a pony probably doesn’t want a game about owning a pony,” Hall said. Instead, she just looked like every girl who loves horses, and that’s who Hall thought they should make the game for. The young woman didn’t look like the daughter of a rich family who owned horses and participated in equestrian sports. When Hall started working on the horse-owning simulator, he tried to figure out who his team should target. He found a picture of a girl with a horse. That started back when he was making the Nintendo DS game Pony Friends for Eidos. Instead, he looked to the gamers in his life and decided to make games for them. And for Hall, this didn’t mean looking at demographics and analytics to see what people are playing. He realized that he could only truly make a great game if he picked his audience - especially in the ultracompetitive mobile market. Matt Hall, the founder of indie studio Hipster Whale and creator of 2014’s mobile hit Crossy Road, used to want to make games for everybody, he explained during his talk at the Casual Connect Asia conference today (that’s Tuesday in Asia time, folks). That was his philosophy when he started his company, but it’s not the philosophy that he focused on.
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