The king of mini games

Former About You manager Christoph Sachsenhausen founded the game developer Sunday. With the start-up, he is fighting for supremacy in the fast-growing hyper-casual games market. About the difficult hunt for the next daddel hit.

Many a description an entrepreneur has of his own target group is, at first glance, contradictory. "Many of our users don't see themselves as gamers," says Christoph Sachsenhausen, for example. This is curious in that he programs games with his company Sunday, but they go by the crazy name of hyper-casual games. These are small games that people play on the side, for example, when waiting for the train. "People who don't have a Playstation or a gaming PC at home do that," Sachsenhausen says. And he wants to become the king of this trend.

Video games that excite even people who don't otherwise play video games: That's a growth market. Hyper-casual games - which, in terms of simplicity, are still one step below titles like "Candy Crush" - now dominate the mobile market. In 2017, their share of downloads for smartphones and similar devices was 17 percent; two years later, it was already 45 percent. That corresponds to around 7.8 billion downloads. By 2020, that figure had risen to 11.8 billion. One of the reasons: They are easy for developers to program, and thanks to advertising, money can be earned quickly with relatively little effort.

Some of the big players on the market are based in Germany. These include the Applike Group from Hamburg, which initially acted primarily as a B2B provider for game publishers, for example when it comes to advertising placement. With Sunday, Applike then founded its own publisher in 2019, which was able to achieve quite a bit of success within a short time. The most successful title, Cat Escape, has recorded 65 million downloads to date. The big names in the industry are still quite a bit more successful; Voodoo Games from Paris, for example, has already recorded five billion downloads for its titles according to its own information. However, the French have been on the market since 2013. In Germany, Sunday is the market leader by its own account, and the company wants to catch up with the international competition in the long term.

A remarkably fast start, especially because founder and CEO Sachsenhausen doesn't actually come from the industry. The 37-year-old was previously employed at fashion retailer About You, where he helped build up its app and mobile division. But as luck would have it, after his time at About You, two old acquaintances had a job for him: Carlo Szelinsky and Jonas Thiemann, the founders of the Applike Group. Sachsenhausen had once started a joint - not very successful - voucher start-up with them, and now they found each other again. With Sunday, he operates largely independently within the Applike Group and quickly learned the most important lesson in the hyper-casual sector: "Anyone can build such a game, but not everyone can build a hit game. 500 to 1,000 new titles would hit the app stores every day, but 90 percent of downloads would go to the top titles. "At one million profitable downloads, a developed game is interesting for us," he says.

The hit rate is low. Accordingly, Sunday tries to minimize the risk of failure as much as possible. Usually, after an idea is deemed good, a prototype is built within a few days. A video is also produced, which the company then plays out on advertising spaces on social networks. "If we determine based on some KPIs that this is something people are interested in, we don't fully develop the game until then," Sachsenhausen says, explaining the process. This marketing test is tough as nails, he says, with 80 percent of prototypes sorted out here. And even of those that then make it into the stores, by no means all of them would take off. "In the end, there are 50 to 100 projects for every hit game that don't make it," estimates the Sunday boss.

However, Sunday has already released six titles that the company itself classifies as hits. In addition to "Cat Escape," these include "Fall Break" and "Plug Head," each with five million downloads. The company says it is already EBIT positive. This year they want to grow and produce a total of 15 of these hit games, according to the plan. So that means several hundred, if not a thousand, projects that need to be kicked off in the coming months. Ideas, prototypes and then finished games are needed. To that end, Sachsenhausen has three development teams in-house, with a fourth to be added soon. "We want to gather the best of the best," he says confidently. But with just these people, he couldn't deliver the output needed to achieve his ambitious goals. So they get a lot of external help, working with 50 international studios. Whereby a studio in the hyper-casual sector doesn't necessarily mean what the uninitiated game fan usually imagines. "It's often a few friends with the right skills who get together in Turkey or India to develop games like this," Sachsenhausen describes. Sunday works with such mini-studios. If one of the external games is successful, the profits are shared. If the games flop, on the other hand, it's called: Game over.