How mobile developer Wooga creates massive hits from the misses

SAN FRANCISCO — In order to create a hit, you have to kill a game. Or dozens of games, according to Jens Begemman, the CEO and founder of Berlin-based mobile game developer Wooga. In a talk at GamesBeat 2014, Begemman revealed how he and his team learned to embrace killing a project, even good projects, if they weren’t great projects.

“We needed to change our approach. We needed to change the way we worked,” Begemann said, citing four of five titles Wooga developed that went on to flop after launch. “For some of these games, we kind of knew a year before launch, ‘This is good, but it won’t become a hit.’ But because stopping was a taboo, we didn’t stop.”