New World Gaming: Army Attack, Fun New Strategy Game, Shows Growing Popularity of "Hardcore Games" on Facebook

I was already loving Army Attack, the new turn-based tactical strategy game on Facebook, when the lead developer of BioShock offered to help me out with an artillery strike, but that definitely helped closed the deal. Army Attack's gameplay is very reminiscent of the beloved Nintendo classic Advance Wars, and also evokes that franchise's humor and story backbone. And while the gameplay is very single-player, there's a strong feeling of playing the campaign with your friends, since you can give each other airdrop supplies, artillery support, and so on. (Hence the Levine artillery strike.)

Launched less than two weeks ago, Army Attack is gaining users at an enormous rate, which is again another datapoint to my thinking that the future of hardcore "gamer games" will be quite Facebook-driven:

While it launched in late May, Army Attack is already fast approaching a million active users, with 30% of them daily active players -- very good engagement rates. As I mentioned last week, another Facebook strategy game, Backyard Monsters, has over 4.5 million monthly players, but it took over a year to reach that point. Army Attack's growth trajectory is much faster. So look for more Facebook games like these soon -- and more gamers playing them.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Give me a turn-based strategy game with the complexity of Civilization V or even Alpha Centauri, complete with the capability to add player-generated art and unit mods, in the browser.

Then I will take seriously the future of "hardcore gamer games" in this format.

[Deep Semaphore]

:) Great article James, I am trying to adopt a similar strategy for my own SL efforts: keep it simple, kiddishly beautiful and casual oriented, build the architecture slowly and improve bit by bit. Here is my first offering in the chance and strategy arena: then I will build and extend later on as time permits http://goo.gl/gFhfE