Who are they?
With its headquarters situated in Changsha, China (Located in the Hunan Province), Reality Squared Games, or R2 Games for short, is an international online game publisher that a global leader in publishing micro-transaction-based, free-to-play browser games. The company prides itself as being a pioneer in a quickly-developing international web game market.

Founded in October 2010, R2 Games had come an impressively long way since its inception 5 years ago and the company’s growing portfolio of games is a testament to its achievements! With games that are translated into 6 different (major) languages, R2 Games has successfully published plenty of free-to-play browser-based MMO hits, such as Nova Genesis, Wartune, Shadowbound, Summoner’s Legion, and Crystal Saga.

The company is consisted of an international and multinational team that manages marketing and PR, locates distribution channels, and carries out day-to-day operations including customer support, community management, and event design/implementation while leaving the game developing and maintaining to the developers themselves. This separation of work whereby each party work on the aspect of game developing and publishing that they are good at is all very well-coordinated and managed. The synergy and spirit of collaboration between developer and R2 Games (the publisher) is perhaps the reason behind the success of the company as well as the games they publish!

Furthermore, tens to hundreds of millions of registered players worldwide play at the gaming platform developed by R2 Games, which is similarly named, including players from their Facebook-integrated games as well as mobile games. The best part? That player number is constantly on the rise for this company. How is it possible for a small company to grow so extensively within merely 5 years to the point where it has become a “household name” (in the gaming context) in Asian countries and it has even been gaining traction in the Middle East, Europe and America? Let’s find out!

What do they do?
R2 Games have published 24 various MMO and tower defense games on quite a range of platforms, including their own gaming platform at R2 Games.com. They mainly specialize in browser-based strategy/RPG MMO games, containing graphics influenced by anime.

One prime example is their recently released game, Nova Genesis, which is hailed as one of the fastest growing and most popular browser-based MMO as of current for this year. Nova Genesis managed to attract plenty of players with its unique and rather outlandish character classes (corsair, wraith and psyon), exciting and interactive team-based combat (that mimics another popular browser-based game, League of Angels) cool-looking mounts as well as its simple-to-learn controls and gameplay. It is no surprise that Nova Genesis became so popular that R2 Games had to release the game’s 47th server to support the ballooning player population barely 4 months since its release!

Besides MMO strategy/RPGs like Nova Genesis, R2 Games also cater to the fans of collectible card games with the brilliant MMOCCG, Summoner’s Legion. In this game, you play as a powerful summoner with cards representing your summoning spells. Unlike a prominent MMOCCG *cough* Hearthstone *cough*, the gameplay in Summoner’s Legion is rather unique, offering CCG players a new perspective to this increasingly popular genre! The game feels a lot less competitive, though the competitive element is still there, and that appeals to the mass of casual core gamers who enjoys this sort of games.

Being a major publisher of browser-based games, the emergence and rapid blooming of the mobile market has caught the attention of R2 Games. Like other major gaming corporations (I.e. Ubisoft, EA Games), R2 Games began to allocate more resources and effort into researching the mobile market as well as headhunting for suitable MMO games to be published in Android or iOS. They have already released 2 MMOs (Cast and Conquer, an MMOCCG and EZ PZ RPG, MMORPG) and a tower defense game (Tribal Rush) on mobile. They have even coined a new genre, “mobile idle RPG”, to refer to mobile MMOs that “so easy to play... it doesn’t even need you!”. These games contain bots that automatically play the game (only the questing and leveling process) for you.

Now that you have a general idea of the company and their games, it is time we go a tad bit deeper to find out what made the company so popular among browser-based gamers! The popularity of their games depends on several factors, but the most important factor of all is their player retention. The problem that all free-to-play games face is retaining players to stay and play for months to years since free-to-play games are easy to pick up and easy to drop as well. Considering that R2 Games only produces free-to-play games with microtransactions, this is definitely one of the biggest problems they have to face! In turn, R2 Games addressed the problem by coming up with an ingenious and win-win solution – engaging the players on a constant basis!

There are plenty of “daily freebies”, “hourly freebies”, “log-in/ check-in gifts” as well as achievement rewards that will definitely tickle your dopamine receptor to get to produce more dopamine. There are always more than 1 event going on at all times to keep their players engaged. The games are also designed in such way that the games are very convenient to play for both busy working adults as well as the more carefree students, and yet the games provide enough positive feedback to the players (perhaps in terms of the increasing battle rating or PvP ranking), so that they feel the time they’ve spent in the game/s are very rewarding.

Furthermore, if you’ve tried any of their games before, you will realize that it is short of impossible to “try” the game without actually playing it. Perhaps the first hour is not as impressive but as you progress, you will uncover plenty of features that vie for your attention! When you eventually check the time, hours have passed. It is by then the players who find that they enjoy the game will stay for the long term.

Not to mention, R2 Games are not only about the quality, they tackle the “quantity” part of the equation as well! R2 Games currently supports 24 different MMO games and each of these games has more than 20 servers, with some games having up to 80 servers. The company has published 4 major MMOs within the span of just 1 year (last year) and that number does not include the mobile games they have released. This year, R2 Games has already published 2 major MMOs, namely Nova Genesis and Summoner’s Legion, with Stormthrone: Aeos Rising (an MMO adventure/RPG) entering open beta just last month and Heroes of the Banner, which is still in open beta. You can definitely expect to see plenty more games from R2 Games before the end of this year!

In addition, due to the company’s hunger for publishing, the company is always on the lookout for the “next big game” that they can help to get off from the ground and turn it into a successful launch. Any developer that managed to get their game published by R2 Games can definitely be assured of gaining plenty of players to flock to their game!

What does the future hold?
R2 Games currently has 2 games in open beta, namely Heroes of the Banner and Stormthrone: Aeos Rising, which are estimated to go fully live in a couple of months. It has also launched 2 new MMOs, Nova Genesis and Summoner’s Legion, earlier this year. It is expected that the company will published a few more games, including both browser-based and mobile games, before the year is up. They also have plans to port some of the more popular games to be compatible to the mobile platform like what they have done for League of Angels.

If you’re interested to take a look at the list of games that R2 Games has published over the years, you can take a look at our R2 Games List to find out more!