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Project Overview
Frantic FC is a fast, frantic and fun football manager game for iOS and Android. Build a team of your favourite players, challenge other users online and play enthralling matches all in under 60 seconds. Frantic FC achieved a Top 10 ranking in the UK App Store within 2 months of launch.
Organisation
Team
Our 3 person studio is based in Melbourne and the creative team is led by Andrew Symons, a 10 year game design veteran.
Project Brief
The goal of c8apps is to become the world’s leading mobile sports game company. To accomplish this big vision c8apps wants to create a portfolio of fun sports games for all major sports. Having already created the #1 ranked AFL game in Australia and a Top 10 hit for Rugby League, this small Melbourne based team has set its sights on football (soccer) - their first truly global game.
Featuring an addictive mixture of strategic planning and competitive, fast-paced matches, Frantic FC allows you to build a team of current players and managers from football leagues around the word. Strategy is deep. Create bonds between players and managers that take your team to the next level. Reigning supreme over other users is just the first step. Take on your friends to see once and for all who has the real football smarts. Complete coaching challenges and defeat the greatest teams of all time such as Brazil 2002. Your job isn't over until you prove yourself a master tactician.
c8apps is taking the lessons learnt from their Australian games and applying them to Frantic FC. In the process, they are redefining the user experience in football management games by offering a simple, easy to play manager game. Frantic FC enables football fans to challenge other fans in quick-fire realtime matches where the battle to be the best requires a mixture of strategy and arcade style reaction based skill.
Project Need
Most mature industries go through a period of simplification through innovation (e.g. search with Google, social media with Facebook/Twitter, and online storage with Dropbox). Football manager games have for too long avoided this process. With a long history of catering to the hardcore football fan, they have become detailed heavy, cluttered and difficult to get into. In the same vein as Google, Twitter and Dropbox, Frantic FC simplifies the football manager concept so even the most casual sports fan can engage and enjoy the game. There are over 2,000 real life football players to choose from and when a match takes place all the highlights of a real 90 minute football match is played in under 60 seconds. The technology to make this possible compares all the player stats and calculates 1,000+ game events in 0.3 seconds.
Frantic FC is the first game in the world that offers football fans the combined features of team management with matches where you can directly affect the outcome through arcade style reaction based mini games. With over 30,000 users and a Top 10 ranking, Frantic FC is fulfilling a demand for better sports games.
Here are some key Frantic FC milestones
- 30,000 users
- Top 10 sports game in the UK
- Ranked in 59 countries
- Played by thousands of users everyday
- The average user would play 3 times per day
- Average of 4 out of 5 stars from over 400 reviews across iOS and Android
User Experience
At c8apps, our core philosophy is the user comes first. Fun game play is always the number one priority, even before monetisation. The experience starts as soon as the user downloads Frantic FC. User on-boarding is such a critical step because you only have a small window to capture the user's attention with your core proposition. Traditional football manager games have a very long and detailed on-boarding process and in the mobile space this is simply too long. In contrast, Frantic FC gives a new user the core proposition within 2 clicks.
The design of Frantic FC is visually appealing, open and intuitive. The game is easy to learn and once a user masters the basics, the game unravels more depth to the user. A core principle is layering the game to give users a strong sense of progression that also helps accommodate the different skill levels amongst users. The colour theme is consistent throughout the game and Frantic FC provides strong visual feedback clues to give users what they expect. Accessibility for all users was a key consideration when designing Frantic FC.
Most users enjoy the competitive nature of the game and are driven to come up with the best teams and tactics to win against their opponent. Leaderboards, match statistics and a history of a user's managerial career are all important factors in creating an environment to bring out the best in a user.
Project Marketing
The sports games market is extremely crowded so it was important to create a marketing strategy that would cut through the competition. Without having the big budgets of other games companies, Frantic FC conducted a guerilla marketing campaign that involved Twitter, Facebook, industry write ups, competitions, and paid acquisition in key demographics. It was important to use images that were high contrast and text that really resonated with the customer. When advertising, we found less is more. Males aged 18 - 34 accounted for 70% of Frantic FC's user demographic.
Our Twitter campaign during the World Cup did exceptionally well. A fake England manager took control of Frantic FC's twitter feed and provided hilarious running commentary during World Cup matches. This form of satire increased the Frantic FC following by a huge amount and created a lot of retweet buzz which drove a large number of downloads in a short period of time.
c8apps also used its strong brand to cross promote Frantic FC to its existing AFL and Rugby League user base. Many sports fans were passionate in a number of sports and found the same great game experience could be had across the c8apps portfolio.
Project Privacy
Frantic FC strives to protect users privacy in accordance with industry best practices and in accordance with their own company values. The game does not capture any personal information about the user except for those who log in with Facebook, which is opt in only. Only their names are stored securely in the Frantic FC database for use inside the game and complies with Facebook's Terms and Conditions. User information is never on sold.
You can find the c8apps privacy policy here http://www.c8apps.com/privacy-policy/
Games
This category relates to games including Action & Adventure, sport simulation, educational, board, card and dice developed for the mobile platform.
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