Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2sTJ7wL">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Skjoldbroder 
Sometimes, you should forget about disruption and radical innovation, and focus on maximising value from your existing product.
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<h4>Radical innovation and disruption</h4>
… have become the stars in the room. Nobody cares about the long tail of products anymore — everybody wants to create radically new products and services, to disrupt value chains and own it all. But there is another star in the room: incremental innovation, which is perhaps less sexy, but also profitable, and much, much safer. So let’s give this type of innovation a little love again, shall we?
<h4>Subway Surfers — a small case study in incremental innovation</h4>
This game was released in 2012 by Kiloo and Sybo Games. Since its release, it has been downloaded more than one billion times, and continues to generate significant revenues. Their success stems from several things, some of which may have simply been serendipity: releasing the right game, at the right time, with the right partners. Apart from this, I will argue that these two companies have also pursued a quiet but brilliant strategy of incremental innovation, which has resulted in Subway Surfers becoming the biggest financial succes in Danish gaming history.
<h4>Incremental innovation strategies</h4>
Subway Surfers has successfully maintained the user base, while also working to expand it, through a series of strategies:
<ol>
<li>Staying true to the formula. Don’t fix what ain’t broken is good advice, and Kiloo and Sybo Games have found a way to iterate without breaking the fundamental “endless runner” core loop of the game, which is what got the users hooked in the first place.</li>
<li>World tour: gain new users. Ingeniously, there is a steady expansion of the user base, through the ongoing World Tour concept. Every three weeks, a new location will be added to the game: Paris, Singapore, Tokyo — you name it. Through this concept, the game instantly becomes relevant to new user segments, allowing for a fresh influx of new users. Obviously if you live in Paris, you gotta check out which locations, items and characters are in your city. This concept is a stroke of genius.</li>
<li>Legacy support: keep existing users. There are a ton of older devices out there, both for Android and iOS. By keeping the game functional on older devices, or legacy devices, you avoid leaving users behind even though the technological field keeps moving.</li>
<li>Constant improvement. 3-week updates ensures that the game is constantly being matured, improved, and bug-fixed. It also keeps the game top of mind for users, and demonstrates that a great deal of care goes into it.</li>
<li>Reliability. Despite the many millions of simultaneous users, Subway Surfers can always connect online, and is always ready to play. Kiloo and Sybo Games have managed to scale their product well to face the basic needs of availability and reliability (which are not so basic concerns at a macro level)</li>
</ol>
There are obviously many other strategies for incremental innovation, maturation and long-tail optimisation. I won’t go into those here. What I want to highlight in particular is the simple but ingenious strategy for expanding the user base, while simultaneously maintaining existing users. The compound effect of this has generated huge success, and is an example which others might seek to emulate.
<h4>Thanks for reading!</h4>
Following this, you could go check out some of the other games Kiloo and Sybo Games have developed. I especially recommend <a href="http://ift.tt/2qwnlih">Blades of Brim</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IitZJ6xTsw">Spellbinders</a>.
(I am not affiliated with either game, but I DO kick ass in Blades of Brim! :-))
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<a href="http://ift.tt/2soNTP6">The quiet brilliance of incremental innovation</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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