Game Tycoon

As you may have already heard, Spry Fox has partnered with Playdom and Playdom is now the publisher of Triple Town on Facebook. This is something that Danc and I are very excited about!

You might be wondering why a studio as focused on independence as ours would choose to work with a publisher. Here, in no particular order, are the reasons:

• Our games have reached millions of users, but never concurrently. We have constantly worried about our ability to scale without major service interruptions or other related problems. Our fans are our lifeblood and we do not want to let them down. Playdom, unlike us, has grown and managed many games with massive concurrent user populations. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from them and lean on them.
• The social gaming market is the most hyper-competitive environment that we have ever worked in. Successful games are cloned with lightning speed and the clones frequently outperform the original. Yes, we could raise a bunch of capital and use it to spend our way to higher user counts, but raising capital takes time and, having never managed a major user acquisition campaign, it is safe to assume that we’d probably spend our marketing dollars inefficiently. Playdom, on the other hand, is in a position to not only cross promote Triple Town to its many existing players, but to help us advertise the game in an effective manner.
• Playdom, unlike many other publishers, offered us a fair deal pure and simple. They did not treat us like creative-but-helpless indies to be mercilessly exploited. They treated us with respect. It was also clear from day one that they were totally in love with the game. We’re pretty sure that some of the execs at Playdom play Triple Town much, much more than we do!
• We want to create great original games. We do not wish to spend our time creating a massive company with a huge operational arm, with all the overhead that entails. So, we will retain complete creative control of Triple Town on Facebook while Playdom takes care of the many important operational and marketing responsibilities that Spry Fox is not well positioned to manage.
• Playdom has made some very advanced tools available for us which will make it substantially easier to analyze activity on Triple Town, to connect with our players, to do AB tests, etc. We could theoretically have built and/or acquired all this from third parties but even in a best case scenario, it would have been neither easy nor cheap, and we would not have had Playdom’s advice as we leverage those tools and grow Triple Town in general. We are not so egotistical as to think we have nothing to learn from one of the biggest players in this market.

So that’s the story. As always, you can expect to hear updates from us as to how it goes. :-)

-Dave & Danc

October has been an insane month for Spry Fox. First we launched Triple Town. Then we launched Steambirds: Survival, mobile edition. Now I’m pleased to announce the launch of our latest original game, Panda Poet for the Web, a total remake of our original Kindle game which was released in 2010!

For a limited time, Panda Poet is available exclusively on our website and the Chrome Web Store.

The Kindle version of Panda Poet is a single-player word puzzle game, but the Web-based version is focused on asychronous multiplayer, and the core gameplay mechanic has been completely revamped to accomodate that. The quickest description of the new Panda Poet is “Scrabble meets Go.” It is a battle for territory between two players, and words are your weapons.

Panda Poet is also our first HTML5 game, which is an interesting experiment for us. We’re looking forward to seeing how we can leverage some of the big platforms that have recently begun to emphasize HTML5 games and comparing the traffic they drive to the traffic provided by Flash game portals, our traditional bread and butter. And we’re curious to see how browser compatability issues affect our retention, if at all. One thing’s for sure: its exciting to fire up the browser on my phone and play Panda Poet on it without any major issues. :-)

As always, we’ve launched what we consider to be the “minimum viable product” and we expect to keep improving the game over time. Four months from now, Panda Poet will look very different. And of course, we plan to put it on social networks and mobile devices, so there is a huge amount of work to be done.

The current business model is simple: Pay $2.99 to disable advertisements and enable the option to play on a 9×9 board in addition to default 7×7 board. My guess is that this won’t be enough to provide the kind of ARPU we are shooting for, but it will hopefully provided a decent baseline that we can build off of. Of course, we expect to generate some revenue from the advertisements itself, but it is hard to imagine that being very significant unless Panda Poet becomes a monster hit. That’s just not something anyone can bet on.

So anyway, please check out Panda Poet and let me know what you think! I will post an update in a few months on the game’s performance. (Speaking of, I’m overdue for an update on our other games. I’ll try to post something in a few weeks.)

Paul Hyman recently interviewed several folks, including myself, for a Gamasutra article on digital distribution that can be found here. I thought you might be interested in the full transcript of our interview. Here it is:

(1) What are your current thoughts on Xbox Live Arcade and how it has evolved as a platform for developers? What about your thoughts on how it should evolve? Please be very specific.

What’s interesting about Xbox LIVE Arcade is that, other than from a content perspective, it doesn’t seem to have evolved very much over the past several years. What I mean by that is the *games* have changed, but the platform itself has changed very little by comparison.

XBLA started out as a place for “bite-sized” and retro games; the kinds of titles that would typically have a $250k development budget. Today some developers are spending $2m+ on their XBLA games and Microsoft has very clearly sent the signal to the market that it is looking for “bigger, better” titles. So that’s a pretty big shift.

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