DeNA's Cousins on why tutorial completion is the key metric for The Drowning's success

It's a truism that first-person shooters just don't work on touchscreen devices.

Of course, this doesn't mean plenty of developers haven't tried.

Gameloft is still banging away with its Modern Combat franchise, for example.

But while with each release it's iterating the control methods and gameplay so they mesh better, the lack of top grossing mobile hit to match Call of Duty or Halo on console is clear for all to see.

Indeed, to underline the issue, Microsoft's just launched Halo for Windows Phone as a third-person shooter, with virtual twin sticks.

One man who believes it doesn't have to be like this is Ben Cousins.

Having previously worked at Sony, Lionhead and EA/DICE, the head of DeNA's Scattered Entertainment studio in Sweden sees opportunities where others see obstacles.

"There's no reason shooters can't be a top three genre on mobile," he says, pointing to audience demand.

To encourage this, Scattered's debut release The Drowning - a first-person shooter without virtual sticks - uses an entirely new control method.

It's been designed so players move by tapping on the ground, swiping the screen to control the camera, and tapping with two fingers to fire.

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The clever bit is you aim your gun at the centerpoint of those two fingers.

Of course, plenty of innovation ends up too clever for its intended audience.

To a degree, this has already happened with The Drowning, which soft-launched in nine countries for three months to fine-tune such details.

One of the first things that happened was the forced introduction of a virtual twin-stick control option.

"Actually, it was Apple which advised us to add it," Cousins reveals.

So harking back to the way the original Halo naturally got players to choose between normal and inverted axis control on Xbox, the game starts using the new innovative controls and then gives players the option to switch after 25 seconds.

Cousins is adamant about which is best, however.

"All the best scores we've seen have come from our innovative controls," he says.

But, more generally, the long soft launch period - something we recently considered in The Charticle - wasn't just about going more casual.

"We actually realised we were doing too much hand-holding through the tutorial," Cousins says.

"We removed parts about weapons upgrading, for example, and there wasn't any drop off in the completion rate."

Indeed, he says alongside 1-day and 7-day retention rates, the most important metric for the team was the tutorial completion rate (although not actually revealing what is was).

Another major change was to introduce a 5-star rating system.

"We realised that players weren't sure about failure or success. It wasn't clear enough from the score," he says.

The number of stars received links to the rarity of items players get to collect after each gameplay sessions. This is one of the game's main monetisation methods as players have to get weapon blueprints and then collect (or buy) the various parts before they can create and equip them.

If nothing else, a shooter has to be about guns.

But pressed about hardnosed issues such as monetisation techniques, he sidesteps.

"Improving retention improves monetisation," Cousins says. "We'll look to grow our user base over time, and that will grow our revenue."

In the medium term, this will led by more content such as more missions and items.

More important, however, will be regular events; something with which publisher DeNA has demonstrated its skill in games such as Blood Brothers.

Similar to it, The Drowning also has an asychronous multiplayer mode that runs in parallel with the single player mode so players can group up and take down huge bosses over a timed period - so-called Raid Bosses.

It's something we'll be following closely in our Charticle and new Monetizer columns in future weeks.

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