The king of mini games

Former About You manager Christoph Sachsenhausen has 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 hit game.

At first glance, some descriptions of an entrepreneur's own target group seem absurd. "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 you play on the side when you're waiting for the train, for example. "Even people who don't have a Playstation or gaming PC at home play them," says Sachsenhausen. And he wants to become the king of this trend.

Video games that inspire even people who don't normally play video games: That's a growth market. Hyper-casual games - which in terms of simplicity can still be classified one step below titles such as "Candy Crush" - now dominate the mobile market. In 2017, they accounted for 17% of downloads for smartphones and similar devices, rising to 45% two years later. This corresponds to around 7.8 billion downloads. In 2020, it was already 11.8 billion. One of the reasons: They are easy for developers to program and, thanks to advertising placements, 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 came to advertising placement. Applike then founded its own publisher, Sunday, in 2019, which has achieved considerable success in a short space of time. The most successful title, "Cat Escape", has recorded 65 million downloads to date. The big names in the industry are even more successful; Voodoo Games from Paris, for example, claims to have already recorded five billion downloads for its titles. However, the French have been on the market since 2013. According to Sunday, it is the market leader in Germany and aims to catch up with the international competition in the long term.

A remarkably fast start, especially because founder and CEO Sachsenhausen does not actually come from the industry. The 37-year-old was previously employed by fashion retailer About You, where he helped build up their app and mobile division. But it just so happened that two old acquaintances had a job for him after his time at About You: 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 have come together 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 a game like this, but not everyone can build a hit game". 500 to 1,000 new titles would be added to the app stores every day, but 90 percent of downloads would be for the top titles. "A developed game is interesting for us once it reaches one million profitable downloads," he says.

The hit rate is low. Accordingly, Sunday tries to minimize the risk of failure as much as possible. Usually, once an idea has been approved, a prototype is built within a few days. A video is also produced, which the company then plays on advertising spaces in social networks. "If we determine that people are interested based on a few KPIs, we first develop the game completely," says Sachsenhausen, explaining the procedure. This marketing test is tough, with 80 percent of prototypes being rejected. And even of those that make it into the stores, not all of them take off. "In the end, for every hit game, there are 50 to 100 projects that don't make it," estimates the Sunday boss.

However, Sunday has already released six titles that the company itself classifies as hits, including "Cat Escape", "Fall Break" and "Plug Head" with five million downloads each. According to the company, 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. This means several hundred, if not a thousand, projects that need to be launched in the coming months. Ideas, prototypes and then finished games are needed. Sachsenhausen has three in-house development teams for this, with a fourth to be added soon. "We want to gather the best of the best," he says confidently. But he wouldn't be able to deliver the output needed to achieve his ambitious goals with just these people. So they bring in a lot of external help and work with 50 international studios. However, a studio in the hyper-casual sector does not necessarily mean what the inexperienced games fan would otherwise imagine. "These are often a few friends with the right skills who get together in Turkey or India to develop such games," explains Sachsenhausen. Sunday works together with such mini-studios. If one of the external games is successful, the profits are shared. If the games flop, however, it's game over: Game over.