Kabam execs tell us how they’re taking mobile games up a notch (interview)

After a 13-year career at Electronic arts, Nick Earl recently jumped ship to run the game studios at Kabam, the fast-growing free-to-play mobile gaming company. He’s the latest console game executive to make the leap to mobile. Earl’s job is to elevate mobile games to the next level.

Kabam is one of the hot companies in mobile, and it recently raised $120 million from China’s Internet giant, Alibaba, in a deal that valued Kabam at more than $1 billion. Kabam said the company is targeting $500 million in revenues, compared to $360 million in 2013. Part of the way it will do that is by creating more games based on movie intellectual properties. The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth has generated more than $100 million in revenue for Kabam, and it is working on properties such as The Hunger Games and Fast and Furious.

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We caught up with Earl and Kent Wakeford, chief operating officer of San Francisco-based Kabam for an interview. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Earl and Wakeford.

GamesBeat: What made you want to join Kabam? What was the last part of your EA experience like?

Earl: The last part of my EA experience was fantastic. My whole 13 years there were a treasure. We had some tough years, but for me personally, it was a great ride, incredibly rewarding. The last three and a half years I’ve been in the mobile group. I came over and became the head of the All Play label. Then Frank Gibeau, as you know, came in as the president and we fused publishing and studios together, creating the EA Mobile group. It was a wonderful three and a half years.

The learning, the opportunity to build something — I wouldn’t say out of nothing, but Jamdat was a very different business. Ultimately EA Mobile is the culmination of a lot of effort — structurally, organizationally, culturally — to build what I’m sure will become a very strong division for EA going forward. Even the last part, when Frank and I divvied things up studio-wise and operationally, it was all very positive.

At the end of the day, the reason I came here, I felt incredibly compelled by the fact that this is a pure play, freemium, mobile opportunity. There’s a real cleanliness and single-minded vision that encompasses the whole effort. I find that refreshing and compelling. I looked at the trajectory of what this opportunity could mean for me and for the shareholders and employees. It looked like there was going to be a great ride ahead.

GamesBeat: How many games were you managing at EA? What’s it going to be like at Kabam?

Earl: The number is going to be pretty similar to the size and scope of what I was doing at EA. Both companies are focused on bigger games, bigger efforts, and more value coming from pure games. I can’t speak to the history of the Kabam slate, but that’s certainly the case with EA. But to answer your question directly, it feels like a roughly similar load. The difference is that it’s more concentrated on our studios here. EA’s studio slate was pretty decentralized.

GamesBeat: It seemed like EA was slimming down a number of titles. They were launching maybe a dozen a year. Is that the pace at Kabam as well?

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Earl: About that, give or take. That’s the plan of record that I’m aware of.

GamesBeat: Kent, what was your interest in recruiting Nick and beefing up the management team?

Kent Wakeford: You’ve seen, because you’ve covered us very closely, this timeline of steps we’ve taken to evolve Kabam into a triple-A mobile game company. You’ve seen that with the acquisition of Exploding Barrel and our Vancouver studio, which is now doing the Marvel Contest of Champions and getting accolades everywhere. We’ve hired Aaron Loeb as a senior vice president, who was a group general manager at EA Mobile responsible for The Sims, and Jordan Edelstein, who was the group vice president of marketing for the Maxis label at EA.

What Nick represents is the culmination of the evolution of Kabam into a triple-A mobile gaming company. We’re excited to have his leadership and his game development experience, especially as we move into this next wave of triple-A mobile experiences.

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GamesBeat: Nick, if you had to describe what Kabam is going to do in its next generation, how would you characterize that?

Earl: There’s an incredible opportunity here. There’s a single-minded vision that I’ve seen from everyone, from floor employees to the leadership, that I find refreshing. It’s a very clean vision in terms of becoming a major player at the top of the charts. These next two years are going to be about pushing Kabam’s slate of games up the charts based on improved product quality, a greater understanding of the base of player value and the player journey.

There’s an incredibly deep understanding of how games bring value to the player here. Even just after a few hours, I’ve seen that they’re very scientific about the artform. That translates into great experiences. They’re going to be compelling for millions of players out there, in strategy games and RPGs in particular.

GamesBeat: Did you have to go through any learning processes to fall in love with free-to-play?

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Earl: I went through that three years ago, as I was moving what used to be EAI, if you remember that group, and the latter part of Jamdat to become EA mobile. That was a process and an education I went through, to learn freemium and free-to-play.

There’s still going be a lot more education where, because Kabam has a real depth of understanding. I’ll continue that journey, and I’m really looking forward to it. That’s ongoing. But as far as embracing the model, I did that long ago. I’ve been fully on board with free-to-play for the last few years. I expect that’s what our plan is going to be here for the foreseeable future.

GamesBeat: The top-grossing ranks have become interesting because the top five never seem to change anymore. What do you think about trying to crack that challenge?

Earl: It’s been very much locked in for the last 12 or 18 months. That’s absolutely true. That’s the real question. It’s a question every publisher out there is asking themselves. Even though it’s been fairly locked in this past 12 months, though, I don’t believe for a minute that it’s going to be forever. There are going to be new entrants in that top five.

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When I look around the landscape of publishers and developers in the space, even though I’m not incredibly close to others like I’ve become with Kabam, I feel like Kabam has as good a shot as any of locking itself into that upper echelon. Based on the talent we have here—I’ve seen a lot of talent. Aaron worked for me. I know what caliber of individual he is, and plenty of others who’ve come here. I see a powerful, collaborative, and supportive board. I see an intelligent and supportive exec team that has a depth of experience. I see this collective energy and passion, a unified vision coming together and putting this company in a place to be one of the top players.

Wakeford: For a game to break into the top five, it needs a combination of excellence in free-to-play game design, which is something Kabam has. It needs an excellence of triple-A game development, which we have with Nick and Aaron and others we’ve brought on. It needs an excellence in being able to market it and bring consumers into the game. We have that in spades now, led by Jordan. We have all of the elements needed to build, market, and operate the next generation of hit game.

GamesBeat: You have 850 employees announced. Do you have 400 or 500 developers?

Wakeford: In terms of developers, it’s more than that on a global basis. In San Francisco we have approximately 400 developers in our studio. We also have another 350 in our Beijing office. Then we have about 85 in our Vancouver office.

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GamesBeat: I’m curious about how your teams are organized now. Do you see your organization continuing the way it is, or do you expect to change some of that as far as how a game gets published?

Earl: I’m very much in listen and learn mode right now. I’ll work very closely with Kevin and the studio leadership team to identify any optimizations that I see or that they see. But I’ll tread carefully. The structure here looks very solid. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s exactly what I’ve seen work before. I don’t see a bunch of changes that need to happen. It feels like it’s more about optimizations. First, I’ll be getting to know the organization, all the talent that works on the teams, and then starting to create some strategies and some leadership direction. It’ll come after a tremendous depth of learning and digesting it all.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you might have some career advice for triple-A people. “Learn the new ways of the free-to-play world.”

Earl: It’s been compelling and rewarding for me to come from the console side. I did that for many years, for 10 years at EA, and loved every moment of it. But this has been a new lease on life in so many ways. I believe this is the future of entertainment. We measure our user base in billions, from a device perspective. The immediate accessibility is well beyond anything we’ve seen before in electronic games. I try to give that advice to anyone on the console and PC side of the business. This is an incredibly exciting place to be. Like I said earlier, it’s refreshing to be at a company that’s focused and absorbed in the space.