GamesBeat: Where do you think the market will be in, say, a year or so? What do you think is going to play out over the next year?
Walcott: I don’t think there’s anything obvious. For us, we’re going to continue to launch more great content out there. We’re going to position ourselves as a stronger player, as the leader with the best content. That’s what we’re focused on.
As far as how we’re going to grow — it’s not going to be with something that happens all of a sudden. It’ll be the hard work of developing games, improving our overall site’s gamification, and providing a compelling reason for people to keep coming back. I don’t see a big crazy breakthrough within any companies, other than perhaps M&A. Or Zynga’s such a giant powerhouse, what with the number of users they have. Potentially there’s some deal that those guys could do with another company that might be something interesting to write about.
One thing I am excited about is the different products with which Facebook allows us to communicate with users. I’ve always told Facebook, and I’ve told them this directly, I think they’re the world’s greatest gaming platform. It’s ubiquitous. As a consumer, you don’t have to pay money and buy a product to get on it. It’s very developer-friendly.
However, they’ve historically been very poor at being a games portal. It’s hard for people to find games on Facebook. Many people don’t know that they can play games from Facebook — other than maybe they’ve seen a post from one of their friends about the Ville games.
As you’re probably aware, Facebook is rolling out their App Center, which is finally a games portal. It’s pretty strong, and I think once they do a good job of promoting it…users can find the best games out there. They can find the games their friends are playing. They can read about games. They can find the top-grossing games. It’s a great way for Facebook to piggyback on the success of established game portals, including the App Store on Apple’s iPhones and other devices.
So that excites me because I think that’s going to be a very powerful way to drive traffic. If you think about Facebook — Facebook’s now a public company. We’re excited for that, and why? Because Facebook now has investors they have to report to. They have to hit earnings. If you’re one of the top monetizing applications on Facebook, from an ARPDAU perspective, you would expect Facebook to drive more traffic towards you.
GamesBeat: So you just passed 100 employees, right?
Walcott: We did. We’re all about celebrating milestones. Back in September, we had our one-million-DAU milestone. It was a goal we set for the entire company back in early 2011. When we hit it in September, we hired a mariachi band to come to the office, and we announced that we were taking the entire company and their families to Mexico. Literally, the entire company.
It was nuts. I’m sure we violated some rules about not having all the executives on one flight, but what are you going to do? It’s a reward to the employees, it makes them very happy, and it’s a reward to the folks who have to suffer the most for all their hard work: their spouses and their families. They get to realize, wow, this is a cool company you work for. They’re excited to be a part of it.
And just the other day, last week, we hired our hundredth employee. He’ll soon be an incredible mobile developer. His name is Brian Gershon. And so around the office, we had a bunch of posters made up that were puns on his name. Instead of Independence Day, it was IndeGershon Day [laughs].
We had 10 other posters like that. We hired the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream truck to hang out by the office. All of our employees got free ice cream cones and so did the entire neighborhood in Pioneer Square where we work.
The cool part about that was, again…how do you make your employees proud of who they work for? A lot of employees were getting texts and calls from their friends saying, hey, I just read about you guys on GeekWire that you’re doing this. It all makes us a fun place to work.
We have 50 positions open right now, and we’re continuing to hire. Today we have a good mobile product, but we need to make it a better mobile product. It has eight different slot machines on it, but our goal is to make it mimic the entire application we have on Facebook. It just requires time and development.
GamesBeat: That’s where the big investment is going?
Walcott: Yeah, it’s going towards mobile. Well, it’s going across the board. We’re literally hiring in every division. But as you would expect of a Facebook gaming company, we’re focusing on development, and in particular, on mobile development.