That's kind of what we have in store for 2012. Pretty much by any measure, we've had tremendous success so far.īB: The best way to approach whatever our competition, whether that's Electronic Arts or Rumble Games, is to continue to launch amazing products and grow them. We're a highly cash-flow positive business, we're continuing to scale operationally and we're at well over 100 people and plan to grow exponentially in 2012.
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We focused really hard on understanding what was working about backyard monsters and how to grow it and it really has over the last couple of years continued to grow and continued to perform and that allowed us the opportunity to create more games. It was innovative game design, execution, really exciting technically because you had this player-versus-player combat element. He was always a really hardcore gamer and really interested in getting into the space.īI: What kind of growth have you guys seen this year?īB: When Backyard Monsters came out there were no games like it on Facebook. Will (Harbin), who is our CEO and chairman, comes from the kind of tech and web space and was successful at a company called Affinity Labs.
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I have background in consumer entertainment, software perspective on EA. We're looking for talent and ability, and that comes from a broad spectrum of places. The extent to which our games can create that, the more users we can get.īI: Where does the core group of engineers and such come from?īB: We're not looking for a specific profile for people we bring to the company. We have gamers that might not be interested in sharing the fact that they just harvested some corn, but might be interested in saying they took down their friend Matthew's base in Battle Pirates. A lot of the growth comes from viral channels, it speaks to the fact that we have games that people are interested in sharing with friends. First of all, because the social graph lets you communicate to everyone you know what you're doing and what you're excited about. We have a lot more in common, a tremendous amount more in common with World of Warcraft than we do with CastleVille or FarmVille.īI: Are you guys looking for a very specific audience when you advertise?īB: Facebook provides an extremely efficient platform for user acquisition. The way people spend time in these games, it's very much in line with the way that some of the MMOs that people often think about in this context, it's in that same vein. That style the game presents, we're not talking about a company that's a pure time waster, it entails a lot of strategic thinking. I think we're on par with games like World of Warcraft, it really speaks to the kind of game that presents to gamers. The games have really reflected that focus. Zynga really took a hold of that and started doing some things for girls, for mostly female audiences that were looking to fill some time. I think the first phase was about really rapid growth and building awareness that you could have really high-quality gaming experiences on the Facebook platform - not just for people who play games, but people who had never played a game before.
The social gaming space is entering into maturity, it's now four-plus years old after Zynga and a few applications before started to experiment a little with it. Kixeye operates in a pretty different niche than a lot of the companies. We're kind of looking to make games we were interested in playing as gamers. They look and feel much more like the core games people are used to playing off of Facebook. See the games we've launched, Backyard Monsters, Battle Pirates, War Commander, these are really immersive, almost synchronous game experiences with extremely high production value. How are you guys different from Zynga?īrandon Barber: We were unhappy with the trajectory of social gaming on Facebook and really wanted to show you could make games that were worth playing - particularly games that we were interested in playing.
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