Kakele Online's Bruno Adami - "We were players before and we hate pay-to-win"

• I spoke with Lucas and Bruno Adami about their MMORPG Kakele Online
• Together we discussed their approach to monetisation and appeasing their player base
• It has capybaras!

As I mentioned in my recent Pokemon Go interview, I attended Gamescom Latam last week. While there, I had the privilege of chatting with many talented AAA and indie developers. Today, we focus on the latter in my interview with Lucas and Bruno Adami from ViVa Games. 

The twin brother duo have a cute backstory, coming together after working in various tech jobs to create a game. And they did! In 2020, they released Kakele Online, an MMORPG that's earned itself a healthy number of players in the last four years. So, I thought it'd be interesting to learn about their journey, influences and how they monetise Kakele, given their disdain for pay-to-win practices.  

Could you both introduce yourselves and your role on Kakele Online?

Lucas Adami: I am Lucas, I'm the co-founder of Kakele Online, and I've been working on Kakele since 2020.

Bruno Adami: I'm Bruno, co-founder of Kakele Online. I'm more responsible for the server side. Obviously in the beginning, we used to do a lot of other things in the game as well, such as community and art. And now we have a small team of eight people, and we have roles of game art and community, story writer - other people taking care of those.

What is the elevator pitch for the game?

Lucas: Our pitch for our game is that it's an MMORPG that gets all the features of classic MMORPGs out there with our own unique twists. We add some cultural aspects to it, especially from the Brazilian culture, and also from global culture, like pop culture, into the game. 

Bruno: The game has Capybaras.

Lucas: You know capybaras?

I know capybaras!

Lucas: So we have Capybara as a pet in the game. The other part of it is that we make the game run as smoothly as possible on older devices. So if you have an older phone, or internet connection that isn't so good, you can still play the game. The other thing is the cross-platform. You can play on mobile and also PC. Although most of our players are on mobile.

What would you say helps it stand out from other MMORPGs? Apart from capybaras, obviously.

Lucas: Well, I think it's the cultural aspect that we add to the game that is popular here, especially in Latin America. So most of our players are from Latin America. They identify with the game content. Like we said, the Capybara, but we also add some pop culture topics that are popular in the region.

Bruno: We started the game as a hobby, and we were players before, and we hate pay-to-win. And we feel that mobile games nowadays, especially MMORPGs, within companies, just want to milk the players. And our approach is like, yes, we need to make money to sustain the game, but we are very anti-pay-to-win in our game. So I think that is a selling point to the players.

So on that then. Obviously, like you said, you still need to make money.  You need to keep the lights on. What is the monetization side of the game?

Bruno: Yeah, we have monthly subscription that is optional, that gives you some advantages, and these advantages are the same for all the players that pay. It's about like six dollars, five-ish pounds, and they gain some advantages, such as losing less things when they die, so the penalty is lower. The other things we have is like skins, so cosmetics. It's mostly cosmetics because we have players who like to stand out in the crowd. 

And one other thing we have is the server boosts. So someone can pay for a boost in experience, but everyone in the server gets that boost. And so, yeah, we try to implement things that either give you only visual enhancement or something that benefits everyone. Another example is we have map events, such as Global Wars, that unify worlds to conquer certain fortresses. Players can wait for it to activate every 40 hours or so, or someone can pay and activate it for everyone. So all players can participate.

What's the total active player base at the moment?

Bruno: It's about 10,000 monthly players. Daily we have about 2,500 to 3,000. So we are still low in terms of the number of players, but the players are very engaged with the game.

What would you say is the biggest change you've made to the game since it launched?

Bruno: I think that when we launched it, we didn't have any plans. It was just before the pandemic and we started making the game. We launched the game in February 2020, so just before the pandemic hit. I just wanted to work with my brother and make something together. We didn't have any plans and what has been changing over the years is that we planned things more now. 

For instance, we lost that hype that you can create when launching a game and building a community that is waiting for it to be released. We didn't have that and this is something that we regret not doing but we learned as we go because we didn't work in the gaming industry before. We worked in the tech industry and we just wanted to make a game.

And also the fact that now we have players, so you do have to listen to them. You can't just change things because you think it's going to be cool, you have to listen to them. We learned that over the years after many mistakes. We're still making mistakes as we go and learning.

Is there anything upcoming you can share with us today?

Bruno: We are planning a new launch, a new expansion in August where we are revamping the game professions. So we are revamping the fishing. We started with fishing but we plan to expand to wood cutting and mining. We have those mechanics in the game today but they are very simple and we want to make them more appealing and fun for the players to go there and do those activities.

One other thing we are adding is that we are fixing the game controls because we learned that - especially mobile players - learn from other games and when they start they will not go through the tutorial, they will just try to apply what they learned from other games and our movement is tile based. 

The majority of other games are not. It's free movement. So we gave up and we are doing free movement now because a lot of players install the game and they see that it's not free movement and they give up. 

Lucas: They write reviews saying, “Oh I didn't like the controls.”

Bruno: It seems like a small change but you know... We hope to gain some players back with this as well.

Were there any particular games you drew inspiration from?

Lucas: We were inspired by Tibia. Zelda from Super Nintendo, RuneScape...

Bruno: World of Warcraft. 

Lucas: Yeah, World of Warcraft. And yeah, old games. I mean, we grew up playing Super Nintendo games.

What advice would you give to players who might try out Kakele Online after reading this interview?

Bruno: So we have a main storyline in the game you can follow. The Capybara will help you with that. You can follow this path but it's an open world so you can also try to explore and find secret caves to hunt or collect rare items. 

Lucas: There isn't a right way to play. The storyline helps a lot in the beginning and there's so much content in the game so take your time to learn the mechanics then follow the main storyline and lore. Then eventually when you feel comfortable you branch out to do other things in the game and try the map events.