What Killed the Cut the Rope Franchise?

if you were growing up in the 2010s chances are you're familiar with this character here this is omnom the main character of The Cut the Rope series they were some of the most recognizable games on the app store right next to games like Fruit Ninja Temple Run Doodle Jump Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies even even having a massively successful YouTube channel with the most popular videos tens of millions of views each but over the years as with everything else Cut the Rope has largely faded from the public eye so in this video I'm gonna

go through the history of the series to find out what zaptolab's been doing with it over the years in an attempt to find out what led to the current state of this beloved series what killed Cut the Rope in 2008 Apple held a press conference showcasing the features of the first iPhone most importantly they showed that it could play games that were downloaded through the Apple App Store the game they chose to show off was Super Monkey Ball and people began to get excited on what other game releases they would see on mobile but something

happened that nobody would have expected the people who were the most successful at marketing and producing the most successful console or PC games weren't the most successful in the mobile game Market the ones who would have the most success were actually the small indie game startups and after 2009 when PopCap and Rovio released their chart topping games another a much smaller company would have a hit of their own zepto lab was founded by twin brothers yifime and semyon voynov in 2010 the word zepto is a math prefix for 10 to the power of negative 21.

it was used to show how small of an operation they were really running the brothers learned how to code in the 90s all on their own and another big thing that separates zeptolab from the competition was the fact that they'd never received any outside funding from investors they were completely on their own and that's what makes what's about to happen even more shocking they released their very first game on October 4th 2010 and that game was the first cut the rope I think a big reason the game was so successful has to do with the

release time again Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds are two other really successful mobile games developed and released by independent Studios and while PopCap released best-selling games before Rovio is a good example of an indie Studio being able to completely overtake the market with one game release and zepto-lab was able to do the same thing with their very first game a feat most game developers could only dream of achieving in their entire career the game went on to get nearly 1 billion downloads 300 million of which were in its first year of being available funding

the company's future endeavors and making the brothers millions of dollars after seeing the success of the first game zepto lab did the same thing that everyone else would do in that situation they went for the Rovio route and quickly started putting out sequels that act more like expansions having new features while also having enough reused assets to save time on making the new games Cut the Rope holiday gifts was released just two months after the first one it was only temporarily available for a little while in December 2010 and then it was removed being relisted

for a few other years it was basically more of the same but with a Christmas skin the next year we got Cut the Rope Experiments yet another reskin but this time the Box looks a little bit different and there are also some new mechanics as well and two years after that we got Cut the Rope time Travel all of these were games that incorporated new features into the formula but that wasn't the only Avenue for spreading The Cut the Rope brand or should I say the omnom brand at the end of 2011 zepto lab even

made the pilot for the main character omnom to have his own television series omnom stories which premiered on both television and YouTube in late 2012. they did especially well on YouTube with each and every episode of the original series gaining over 10 million views and 60 million on the pilot alone the show had a massive reach so large that you might even know the character of om Nam without even knowing about to Cut the Rope games however unlikely that may be in late 2013 we'd see the release of Cut the Rope 2. as a direct

sequel it does what you'd expect it finally gives an upgrade to the graphics and it adds in a mix of both the classic gameplay and all new features being a more modern mobile game much like the second Plants vs Zombies Cut the Rope 2 introduced microtransactions however that's not their only method of monetization they also have a 20 starter bonus which could remove ads among other things as well as a VIP membership where you could pay monthly in order to get various in-game things wait hold up did that say the thing that separates this installment

from the rest of the series are the use of external characters friends that help omnom out on his adventures this is actually something Rovio did they made Angry Birds 2 after several other sequels although this one was actually released two years earlier and much like Angry Birds 2 Cut the Rope 2 was very successful getting over a hundred million downloads on Google Play alone the next year zepto lab really started branching out to other genres releasing a spin-off called my omnom which was their take on the My Talking Tom duck life or poo type games

where you feed interact and play with your own little omnom while the concept has been done before this is also the first time we've seen omnom as a 3D model I think it looks cursed as hell but hey they added a woman so extra points for a diverse cast of characters Cut the Rope Magic came the next year and it's actually more ambitious than you might expect when you hear the title and that it has a gimmick you'd assume it's like holiday gifts experiments or time travel but they didn't just reuse assets and call it

a day they made the game look much nicer with its lighting and the gimmick is pretty good too you have the ability to turn omnom into various other forms like a fish or ghost the most interesting thing to note here is that this is actually the last game in the original Cut the Rope Saga everything after would either be an alternative type of game or the remaster later on the series kept going hard with the spin-offs as well releasing omnom bubbles the same month this one was basically just those bubble popping games like the one

you'd see on Facebook or Angry Birds omna Maya papaya is a wacky one it's a match 3 game that quite literally revolves around omnom even though he doesn't really do anything to affect the gameplay food appears and you have to get them out of the way by arranging them in sets of three in a row it somewhat reminds me of Zuma but even then the comparison is only really superficial 2019 brought us two more omnom games where's omnom and omnom merge omnom merge plays like every other merge game you feed monsters and merge them together

to get other monsters where's omnom is a lot more interesting this is actually a game for the gear VR which was Samsung's phone VR device it puts you in the setting of a lab and you need to interact with objects to find omnom or else you'll mess up the space-time Continuum and ruin the whole universe or something omnom run is a game that came out in early 2020 and it's about what you'd expect it's a three-lane endless Runner akin to Subway Surfers and Minion Rush and Sonic Dash and tag with Ryan and any other silly

little Runner game on the App Store it's really just another genre of game that omnom was able to invade into and lastly we have Cut the Rope remastered which is actually the most recent installment in the franchise released in 2021 on Apple arcade and I'd say it's actually a really good remaster it isn't trying to be a remake so it doesn't have to follow the original game verveda they also chose to go with 3D models throughout the game you could feed this little baby which is actually omnom's child that means these two canonically [ __

] the gameplay is pretty much the same as the other games just some simple puzzles that incorporate new mechanics every once in a while but here's the thing throughout the release of all these Cut the Rope games zapdo lab was also working hard on creating other games completely unrelated to their original Flagship series a lot of similarities can be made to Angry Birds developers Rovio especially the comparisons between the spin-off games but unlike Rovio while they only started producing non-angry Birds games after it was too late to make an impact zapdolab continued to release other

non-cut the Rope titles always making sure to keep things fresh by only releasing a handful of Cut the Rope games at most to a year dispersed between other titles and they actually found some success in doing so the first non-cut the Rope game was putting monsters in late 2012. the game follows the same logic as its predecessor it's another level based puzzle game featuring monsters where you can collect up to 3 stars that game did fairly well in its own right then a few years later we got King of Thieves another game that did pretty

well then after a couple Cut the Rope games we got a game that did exceedingly well have you ever heard of cats crash Arena turbo stars is a game that was made by zepto-lab in 2017 and it's a game that has grown a massive community of its own without any connection to cut the rope the game has over 50 million downloads on the Google Play Store as well as a YouTube channel with over 1 million subscribers it's highly impressive that they were able to catch a second wind and cats is even more popular than Cut

the Rope at times there were other unrelated zepto-labs games after cats too like bullet Echo robotics Evo pop and finally downhill Smash in late 2021 all of these games did pretty well but nowhere near as well as cats or they cut the rope games which is to be expected as they were always on the side if I had to point to a flaw zeptolab did to cause the death of the franchise I guess I can point towards how inherently child focused the series had become after the first few games I can't think of anyone over

the age of maybe seven or eight who would choose to sit down and watch the show or want to play a merge or endless Runner just because it features omnom I feel they may have lost their ageless appeal that way even if it most likely increased the monetary gain but unlike the vast majority of other mobile games zapdoleb actively continues to update and perform maintenance ends on their legacy titles to ensure that they can remain playable even on the most modern devices so from what I can tell zepto lab never did anything inherently wrong they

branched out to other mediums and even made better in higher caliber games over the years I guess the only real explanation for the decline of Cut the Rope could have been the lack of spreadability that other popular franchises have FNAF has lore and Minecraft has mods these factors give reasons to spread the game to everyone else you know and it keeps the games relevant for years on end there obviously wasn't anything they could have done to keep cut the rope as the center of attention forever especially since it's a mobile game with a limited number

of levels sometimes people just move on and omnom's days of eating candy are left in the past foreign