September, 2016
How many games are you making in a year? Luai Mahjneh: We’re making one game in a month. We want to diversify our risk. Other gaming companies do one game a year, and when it doesn’t work out, they basically wasted one year of their life. Okay, you never waste time, you always learn, but still…
That sounds like you cannot concentrate on one project Yes, but we can respond to the market needs very quickly. If something is trending, we can shift to that and start working on a new project. One example: Our game Tap Fly Hero was only one of four games we presented on the Nordic Game conference.
And you want to say It wasn’t your favorite game? We were super excited about another html5-game we did. But for some reason everybody loved Tap Fly Hero. Two weeks after Nordic Game, Sony Mobile contacted us, they said they’ve been playing our game for weeks and want to do some preparation with us.
What does that mean for you now? Tap Fly Hero is on soft launch now, in cooperation with Sony Mobile. Sony is promoting our game, so we’re getting free users, and we’re spending zero euros for user acquisition.
How do you react to this regarding your team size? How many people we are depends a lot on the projects. Basically, our whole team is engineers only, we have zero artists, zero composers. Everything else except our core competence is outsourced. We habe people in Helsinki and people in Indonesia. We used to have artists, but this is working so much better.
Besides Tap Fly Hero, what else are you working on? Our other team is making mid-core games with html5 right now, for our key market number one.
And that is? It’s Brazil. You’re thinking: Why Brazil? Because it’s the biggest American market in the world and they’re facing one big problem: They’ve got a lot of smartphones, but most of them are low-end devices. Many mobile game companies that come to Brazil enter with games that are done with Unity and therefor very heavy to run. They only work with the newest devices. Our games are on every single smartphone that you’re able to buy. Actually, if you can find a smartphone that doesn’t run our games, give me a call.
Interview: Tim Rittmann