Mobile gaming comes full circle with ‘Clawee’
After experiencing an unprecedented boom during two years of pandemic-imposed lockdown, the mobile gaming industry is having a tough year in 2022. In the United States, consumer spending on mobile games fell nearly 10% in the first half of the year, according to a recent report from apps researcher Sensor Tower.
I was intrigued to learn from the report that a game I had never heard of was one of the few developing right now. clawee is not from one of the top mobile game studios like Supercell or King. It doesn’t have stunning graphics or familiar characters. Still, it generated $16.5 million in revenue from US gamers in the first half of the year, Sensor Tower estimates, making it the first mobile title in the “arcade” genre.
I quickly discovered that clawee is really a genre in its own right. There are countless retro-style “arcade” games that invoke nostalgia for 1970s and 1980s coin-operated machines. But clawee brings a real real life arcade to your phone.
The game’s Israel-based developer Gigantic operates a warehouse full of hundreds of claw machines, each with a mechanical arm descending through a jumble of stuffed animals, key chains and other prizes. These are connected to high-speed internet connections which allow users to remotely control the claws. A live video stream shows you what, if anything, you manage to pull off. If you win, clawee will even deliver the physical item to your doorstep. If you don’t want to play yourself, you can watch others do it, as if you were in the arcade.
Is it a happy return to the game from the end of the quay? Or a sign of the end of times for innovation? Curious about the game’s appeal, I gave it a try. On my second attempt, I won a cuddly “lucky cat” keychain. What luck! Or not. A couple of friends also won their first clawee prizes with suspicious ease, which isn’t a feel anyone who’s played the devilishly difficult grabbing games in an arcade is likely to recognize.
Despite the ‘free shipping’ promise, claiming my prize meant paying £3.49 a week to ‘ship as many prizes as you want’, or joining the Clawee Club for £7.99 a month for a stack of virtual coins necessary to play and the chance to win “exclusive prizes”. Gigantic insists clawee is not a game, arguing that there is skill involved in the two button presses allowed with each input attempt. Sensor Tower estimates that gamers have spent nearly $100 million on the app globally to date.
Investors seem to believe in its long-term potential: Gigantic raised $7 million in venture capital this summer, while claweeThe creators of claim they’ve invented a new genre of “connected reality” games that merge bits and atoms. “It bridges the gap between reality and virtual reality,” Gigantic chief executive Ron Brightman told Israeli trade publication Calcalist.
The complexity of building this type of system is beyond doubt. Making a mechanical arm move immediately when you tap a touchscreen thousands of miles away, thousands of times a day, is not trivial. But after the most frenetic decade of tech investment in history, with hundreds of billions of dollars thrown into start-ups around the world, it’s hard not to look clawee and I wonder, is that all there is?
Many of the most lucrative “free-to-play” mobile games borrow their business model from Japanese “gacha” machines that dispense capsules with toys inside. Apps have gotten creative in tricking players into buying “loot boxes” containing mysterious items to aid in-game progression. Reviewers say these are barely distinguishable from the game. An app that combines loot boxes Digital loot with real-world gacha machines is as inevitable as it is, well, depressing.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT’s Global Technology Correspondent
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