CrowdStar Targets Hardcore With Wasteland Empires

It Girl developer CrowdStar debuted today its first social game built for a hardcore audience: a post-apocalyptic strategy game dubbed Wasteland Empires. In the game, players control their own clan of nomads as they build their own villages and battle opponents using real-time combat. With this new title, CrowdStar hopes to diversify its games portfolio and differentiate itself from casual social game developers. Jeffery Tseng, co-founder of CrowdStar, told Gamasutra that Wasteland Empires is CrowdStar's latest effort to offer deep experiences in other genres within the social space. "We have seen a great success with our RPG games in both Facebook and mobile with It Girl and Top Girl, especially with their higher ARPU than the casual games… We are now focusing on RPGs and strategy games, as casual game space is getting fairly crowded. We see more opportunity for deeper engagement and innovation with RPGs and strategy focused games," he said. CrowdStar added that it has doubled its total staff since the beginning of the year, and the company says this has helped its developers create more diversified games and products. Just yesterday, CrowdStar announced that it hopes to further expand its business with a new strategy to launch its popular franchises across multiple platforms, spanning social networks and mobile devices in Western and Asian territories.