How Wooga is staying focused on story-based gaming | Nai Chang interview

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Wooga has been making social mobile games since 2009, and it continues to do so under ownership of publicly traded Playtika.

And now Berlin-based Wooga is announcing its Ghost Detective hidden object game for Netflix Games today. The subscription platform is a new one for Wooga, but it continues to focus on games with compelling narratives. Ghost Detective is part of the hidden object genre where Wooga has been successful in the past with titles such as June’s Journey.

This title will focus on a story set in the streets of New Orleans as the ghost of a veteran detective attempts to unravel the mystery of her own murder. The game is included in the Netflix membership. Wooga has more than 300 people working for it.

I caught up with Nai Chang, managing director at Wooga, at the recent Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: So June’s Journey is by far the most successful game you’ve had?

Chang: Yeah, I think so. For Wooga, if I look at the history of Wooga games, the lifetime revenue of our games, it starts off 13 or 14 years ago in the Facebook era. Those were a couple of million. Then it got bigger and bigger. We had Pearl’s Peril, one of the games we launched nine years ago now, and that did tens of millions. Then we released June’s Journey, which did far more than our last game. We have a history of having higher LTV games. This one was a step