Above: Rival Kingdoms
Over the next year and beyond, what we want to become is the Blizzard of mobile gaming. It’s a long stretch, but what I admire about Blizzard is they do two things most of the rest of the industry views as antithetical. First, they are very focused on quality. You know their games are going to be good. You know they’ll have clan features, that they’ll be community-focused.
On the other hand, industry observers of Blizzard also note that Blizzard makes moves around commerciality. They make games they think can be number one worldwide, that can be box office hits. Their players don’t give them heat for that, and the reason is because Blizzard always brings something special to a genre. In Heroes of the Storm, it’s a MOBA, but it’s a lot different. It’s 20-minute games. I’m leveling up my talents instead of getting items. Five different maps. A lot of alternative objectives. I feel like they put enough of a signature on it.
We want to be that player in mobile. We want to have the highest quality games and we want to occupy the most lucrative genres, but like Blizzard we want to be focused on gamers. We’re not going to be a casual company.
GamesBeat: I wonder how many opportunities there are to create a game that leads a whole genre. League of Legends, it seems like an entire genre follows that idea. Clash of Clans seems to lead the asynchronous multiplayer game. Blitzkrieg 3 is a real-time strategy game, but it has asynchronous multiplayer where you set up a bunch of defense points, a bunch of traps, and then the other guys just attack you. Dungeon Hunter 5, from Gameloft, also followed that idea. It seems there’s a fair amount of possibility to create interesting games using that.
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Do you think about creating multiple games around just one feature?
Earner: So many genres from PC, where we all look for inspiration these days, have yet to find their home on mobile because of the lack of adaptation. There’s a lot of opportunity to just continue taking the genres gamers have known and loved for 20 years and find a way to make them accessible on mobile. But as you say, these core mechanics we’ve discovered in our effort to make a game playable on mobile — we talk about the bus test. Can I put this game down because I need to see if my bus stop is coming? It takes a lot of work. It’s harder than it looks. But I think that there are many more genres to come and a lot of innovation to do.
From our perspective, we’ve spent two years building a capability and a foundation of success and talent and know-how on mobile. What we’re going to do in 2015, and the reason we raised that $7 million in funding we announced last year, is we want to diversify out of the genre we’re in. By the end of the year, we’ll have four teams – two on live games, two on in-development games. 30 percent of our headcount is doing risky new things that we can afford to see fail.
If you look at the game companies that have been the most successful, the ones that have found these new genres around existing mechanics, it’s taken time. Wargaming is 12 years old. King is 10. Supercell was three years old before Clash, but arguably older than that. We want to get Space Ape quickly into a position where we can afford for a game to fail without it impacting the bottom line. When that happens, which will be midway through this year, we’ll start experimenting with a bunch of new genres and mechanics.
GamesBeat: How many people does it take to make a game for you guys? Supercell has tried to stick to very, very small teams.
Earner: Fifteen to 20 for a game that’s like Samurai Siege or Rival Kingdoms. It’s scoped out. It’s defined. If we’re trying to make a new game, we put a team of three to five on it. Our third team is five people – a designer, a developer, a producer, and a couple of artists. We’ve got them away in a corner. If you were to add one more person to that team they’d just get in the way. That’s Supercell’s point. The best ideas come from these small teams.
Above: Rival Kingdoms map
GamesBeat: Clash of Clans still has just 15 people.
Earner: Samurai Siege is the same. I don’t think you get Clash from prototype to live with five people, but you don’t get it done with more than 15 or 20. I had a bad experience with this, and it was my fault. At EA Playfish we wanted to get Sims Social across the line quickly. We scaled the team up to 50 and the velocity of the game just radically slowed down. It was that experience that led me believe teams of 15 are better.
I do think it’s 15 and not five. If you have a company like ours, 70 people, you can afford to have three or four game teams. Increasingly in our market, though – this is true of Supercell as well – the support structure to do the marketing, to make the partnerships in Asia, to look after 150 territories worth of community support and customer service, that part has to grow a bit. You can have these lean and mean game teams, but they’re backed up by an effective global marketing team.
GamesBeat: They use Helpshift to work on FAQs and customer support, outsourcing a lot of that work.
Earner: We think that community and customer service are not cost centers. They’re revenue centers. If you have a free-to-play game and you have players spending tens and hundreds of dollars over their lifetime, when one of those players gets upset at something, I don’t think you want a third party helping them out. We have about a third of our total headcount – although admittedly it’s part-time and contractors – on customer support and community. We have a lot of data suggesting that has added about 20 or 30 percent to our revenue.
The reason you outsource customer support, historically, is that you view it as a cost, a necessary evil. If you view it as a way to make money, you want it in the company, and we do. All of our CS is in-house. All of our CS agents from around the world are in London this week and the next, like a global meetup. It’s an awesome vibe. Because they’re close to our teams, they understand what we’re doing.
More so than most people in the west, we run a lot of live events. Every week, like in Asia, we have live events. We focus them around when people have time to play. It increases your burden of CS, but we find that by keeping it in-house we can create a more delightful experience for players.