Short Fuse

A lot of people in the industry were complaining about the App Store and how it was designed and you couldn't get visibility, and my reaction to that was, "it's the same as traditional retail". If you get a game into Best Buy but you don't get an end cap and you haven't paid to market it, it goes on the bottom shelf in the corner of the action genre and no one ever sees it. If you don't have all the vehicles at your disposal, and you've not done all your packaging right, and made a good game with good reviews then people won't buy it.

That same mentality or approach still exists in the App Store, the only difference is there's two end caps. One is Apple Features, which is totally curated by Apple. We've got some great contacts there but at the end of the day they make it really clear that their content editorial team is a walled garden, they look at every game on its own merits. Our representatives at Apple with advocate on our behalf but at the end of the day its up to the editorial team. Apple will tell you that if you're just counting on being featured by them, that's a bad strategy to be successful over a long time.

The second area to get exposure is in the Top Rankings. Every store operates differently but they all use a rolling, weighted algorithm to determine the most popular games by download volume or by top grossing revenue. And that's the other area where if you market efficiently you can create a perfect storm of awareness that helps to get you high up in the charts so you have a degree of organic visibility where most people are discovering content on a device for themselves. If you're in the top 25 you'll get seen. If you're number 255, believe me, you've got no chance. And that was our mandate from the get go - come up with the right business models, the right marketing partners, and the right technology platform ourselves to makes sure that when we launch a game we get visibility to our audience - effective positioning in the store.

Apple will tell you that if you're just counting on being featured by them, that's a bad strategy to be successful over a long time.

The interesting thing about this business is there is literally a snowball effect. The more customers you have and the more you have playing in your own games is crucial. The other powerful piece of technology we bought is this cross-promotional engine that includes a bunch of different features and functionality, but essentially allows us to get a person playing on one game exposed to another game. It's nothing revolutionary but they way we put it together it really helps us to optimise our marketing in real time and that's something we couldn't see anybody else doing. We need visibility in the App Store but we also need a big eco-system of players ourselves. That had fed our publishing strategy. Instead of just us launching a game every 6-8 months, if we have 8-10 partners who we can work with really collaboratively, who are looking to launch 3-4 games per year, then we end up with a really stable release slate of high quality content. It gives us a really big player base to deliver more content to. As a player the big challenge I have is a lot of the stuff in the top rankings isn't necessarily my cup of tea. Curation is an issue for players. I can peruse the top 50 apps but all of those are there for a whole bunch of different reasons. If I buy a great game I want to know that the company behind it, and their network of developers, is making other good stuff.

Right now we've got seven developers that we're working actively with, and that's having met over 100 developers since February. Everybody from a guy in his basement to the biggest development studios in the world. Right now we're working with five of them in an extensive capacity. But our goal for next year is to release 24 games and we're on slate to do that, so that's about two games per month. It sounds kind of ironic but we would prefer to have fewer partners that are bringing high-quality games because we'd rather be doubling down on those learnings really quickly rather than bringing new partners up to speed on an ongoing basis. Maybe 10 or 12 at the most, but it's quality over quantity.

This is an unprecedented opportunity in our industry to make a game for free, get it out to 100s of thousands of players within a week and you don't have to pay Apple or Android any money to do that. In 2001 when I started Groove we were giving away demo discs and every one of those cost us 50 cents and we had to get them into retail.

We talk about this, and it's not necessarily a positive analogy, but you get as many people into the casino as you can and then you've got to do a great job of keeping them there. Casino's don't charge to get in, and if you don't get a positive experience out of the casino you won't stick around. If we have good enough games and we're giving them out for free then we should be able to get people in the door. With our last three games we had more than four million downloads. That's the way to go, bring in a big audience, use our analytics to make sure we're giving the audience the experience they want, and then they will pay appropriately.

You're totally right, but we use the casino analogy just because it's easy to understand. You're right it does have a negative connotation. But that's one of the things that really differentiates us from our competitors, the social gaming guys that admit they are an analytics company first and a gaming company second. I really dislike that explanation. If you don't have great games that go beyond an addictive core game loop, and deliver something that is more compelling and entertaining to players, you might have a good run and it's difficult to criticise some of those companies... But from Fuse's perspective we're rather be working with partners that produce extremely high quality and entertaining games. The foundation of our business is that you have to make great games. But then you have to use data to make sure you're giving players what they want. Maybe naively it's a little bit more idealistic than other companies.