The summer of 2008 changed everything.
Apple’s launch of the App Store a year after the release of the iPhone was a watershed moment not only in the business of technology, but in every aspect of humanity. Nearly every industry can look back at data before July 2008 and after and see how rapidly and profoundly things changed. But one sector in particular turned into a completely different beast.
Gaming.
We’ve seen some amazing firms come out of the mobile gaming space, some with more success than others. One gaming founder who experienced the full gamut of entrepreneurial emotion is Thor Fridriksson, founder of QuizUp. As we head into 2020, I hopped on the phone with him to discuss the rapid rise of QuizUp in the early oughts, its hard fall from grace following a botched deal with NBC and Fridriksson’s predictions about the next decade of mobile gaming.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Emphasis is mine.)
Jordan Crook: Can you believe it’s almost 2020? Doesn’t feel real.
Thor Fridikksson: I remember when I was teenager. I was into role playing games like the typical nerds. One of the ones I loved the most was called Cyberpunk 2020. It was set in 2020, and it was all about bionic arms and implants and very, very futuristic stuff. And this is kind of why 2020 has a special meaning to me. But, usually, when people predict the future, they’re always so far off. It’s almost unbelievable.
Yeah, we haven’t quite gotten that that down yet, have we? Really being good at predicting the future. Maybe this next decade, with the era of big data, will change that. But let’s focus on the past for a bit. Take me 10 years back. I want to hear about how QuizUp became the popular game it was. You guys reached 20 million users in the first 12 months.
At the beginning of the decade, I was just graduating from university. I had lived in Iceland all my life, but for my MBA I moved to the UK to attend Oxford. It was a pretty wild time for me, especially because Oxford University had this annual thing called ‘Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford.’ I was watching this whole smartphone revolution that was just taking place.
We had the privilege of getting some really top entrepreneurs from the Valley at Oxford and they actually spent a whole week with students in the MBA program. People like Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, and others. I volunteered to be a tour guide for them.
And it was just fantastic! It was fantastic to be having dinners with these entrepreneurs from this totally different kind of environment in Silicon Valley. The environment for the U.S. entrepreneur is so much different from the European, in many ways. U.S. entrepreneurs have this kind of boldness, this fearlessness. Their feelings about failure were something that I was fascinated by.
At later stages, I would have to experience this myself. Personally, I think that one of the things that the U.S. entrepreneurial ecosystem gets right is that the stigma of starting a business and failing one is not nearly as strong as it is in Europe. If you start the business in Europe and you somehow fail, you will not have any chance to … it’s like, you’re an immediate loser. Whereas the thinking, or how people perceive entrepreneurs in the U.S., is that they’re those guys that try and try and try again. This is such a big difference in mentality between the two continents, and this is one big advantage that the U.S. has.
Fridriksson returned to Iceland after graduating Oxford during one of the biggest economic collapses in the world, which hit Iceland particularly hard. “There was absolutely nothing for a newly graduated business guy to do,” he said. This is around the time he started Plain Vanilla, which would be the parent company of QuizUp. He completely focused on the Icelandic market, unconcerned with the U.S., after having seen the smartphone unlock various geographies.
The first game out of Plain Vanilla wasn’t a trivia game at all. It was actually a children’s game called The Moogies that Fridriksson spent 18 months designing and producing. He recalls it as the classic founder story — he sold all of his stuff, spent all of his money and took out a bunch of loans to fund the project. “I wasn’t really thinking about VCs or anything like that, especially because there weren’t any here in Iceland at the time,” said Fridriksson.
In 2011, Plain Vanilla launched the Moogies, a sort of interactive, cartoon-based game for kids.
It was a massive failure. It’s one of those moments in life where you just put your heart and soul into something. I will always remember this moment. It was a pivotal moment before I started QuizUp. We were working with this big publisher, and I was waiting to see the first sales numbers for the game after it launched.
It was a big thing in Iceland. I was in the press and doing interviews and the launch of the game was big news in Iceland because we’re such a small country. I was really excited and I was thinking, ‘I hope it’s going to be 500,000 downloads, but 100,000 would be great. 50,000 would be OK.’ I was refreshing the dashboard and when I finally saw the number, it was only 500 units sold. Immediately, in one heartbeat, I knew that one and a half years of hard labor was down the drain.
What do you think went wrong there? Did you spend too much time building it out without an MVP or a beta? Do you think it would have done better if you shipped something a bit more bare bones earlier?
I don’t think that was what I did wrong. Actually, I’m a big believer in polish. Especially when it comes to games, I don’t think you should just try to get something out to prove something. You should really, in all your products, think about the details and offer a more finished product than an MVP.
In the case of the Moogies, it was a paid app. This is just around the time when free-to-play and the freemium economy was starting. So, paid apps just did significantly worse. The reason I wanted it to be paid is because I didn’t like advertising, especially not in children’s apps. I was against in-app purchases at the time and advertising, and I just wanted to create a very safe and nice experience for young children. I had my own toddler at the time who was the Chief Tester of the game.
So, it was a paid app. But the other issue is that breaking into the children’s category is so tough. They are probably the most brand loyal audience you will ever find. And I’m not really talking about the kids, I’m talking about their parents. When you have a kid that likes a certain theme of toy, like Mickey Mouse or whatever it is, their parents will only buy that. It’s very hard to get any sort of virality or break into children’s brands without mainstream marketing money.
Was the Moogies the only game Plain Vanilla launched before QuizUp?
Well, I get this idea of QuizUp. It’s a dark winter night in Iceland. I had just realized that I was bankrupt. And there was no way for me to get any more funding from Iceland. I was really feeling, what I mentioned before, this scorn. I would go to see investors and they’d ask how Moogies went, and I would tell them and try to make it look prettier than it was. They would block me immediately because there is this stigma of failure. And this is when I really felt that being in Europe, and having failed on my first try… it really damages your chances of getting up again.
I get this idea for QuizUp and write it on this electric bill that I can’t pay. And I was just convinced. I get this really strong feeling that this game would be the formula to virality and success. Users would play real people in real time and they would have all these rankings and titles. People are so vain, in general, that I knew they would just love it. It felt like something that hadn’t been done before and I really wanted to do it.
But, again, I had no money. I was totally bankrupt and had no employees anymore. But I remembered those guys from Oxford, Reid Hoffman and Biz Stone, and I think to myself, ‘I’m so connected. I’ll just go there. I’m 100 percent sure that with this great idea, these VCs will just throw money at me. I’ll be able to do this. Easy Peasy.’
Fridriksson hired two engineers on the promise of getting to move to San Francisco and help on the project. The plan was for the engineers to build a prototype of QuizUp while Fridriksson went around to VCs trying to secure seed funding. They all lived in a small apartment together.
This plan was a bit naive, when I look back at that time. I was expecting a red carpet to be waiting for me. That, when I arrived in San Francisco, people would be throwing money at me. And it was actually quite the opposite. Getting seed funding with just an idea is quite hard.
So did you get the funding?
It took some trial and error. I started the process very optimistically. I would send emails to all the big funds, like Sequoia and A16Z, and the email was something like, ‘Hi. I’m Thor. I’m from Iceland. I have a great idea and I would love to have you join in this round. I’m available to meet you next week on Wednesday to show you what I’m working on.’
These emails were very optimistic. I didn’t get any answers at all, and realized that the cold emails are not the way to go. I started showing up at these meetups and entrepreneurial events and met with some different entrepreneurs. Somehow, when I started getting the first entrepreneurs on board, things just started happening. I got some amazing entrepreneurs on board like David Helgason, the founder of Unity, and we got some money from Crunchfund, and from like 20 different angels and we ended up raising a little over $1 million in seed funding.
With the money in hand, Plain Vanilla started the launch process with a number of smaller, category-based trivia apps. There was one based on Eurovision, the massive song competition across Europe. There was a Batman quiz app, which was quickly shuttered after the team received a Cease & Desist from Warner Brothers. There was a basketball quiz game, and a few others that focused on these small, niche categories.
“None of the apps got any real traction, but we saw that the people who played it really liked it,” recalled Fridriksson. “We had no traction, but very high engagement. We were learning how to create this as a platform.”
While they worked to perfect the QuizUp formula, learning from each of the mini category-based games they launched, Fridriksson set off on a new challenge: distribution.
“The hardest thing is not making the product but getting distribution,” said Fridriksson. He thought it would be good to get a tie-in with some big brand who could help the platform go to market. He started with a trip to LA to visit major movie studios and ended up having a great meeting with Lionsgate, which was on the precipice of releasing Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II, the final movie in the Twilight Saga.
“Surprisingly, they just said ‘yes,’” Fridriksson told me. He also recalled getting back to the team and telling them the news. Unsurprisingly, his small team of middle-aged engineers wasn’t exactly inspired by the idea of building a game around an adolescent vampire love story.
It was the first real break Fridriksson and the team had gotten. The official Twilight Facebook page would post about the Twilight quiz game, and the post would get 150,000 likes. “It felt very empowering,” remembers Fridriksson.
The app got 2 million downloads out of the gate. But, as with anything, Twilight fever wore off.
How did you use the launchpad of 2 million downloads to eventually getting 20 million downloads for QuizUp in the first 12 months?
We used the traction. I always say to other entrepreneurs that getting the next series of funding is so dependent on some sort of traction. That’s when the investors get excited. I did a proper Series A round and that’s when I decided to roll with it. I wasn’t going to do any more games. I decided to do that ultimate trivia game. So we spent about a year doing that, and putting a lot of effort into product development.
So where did QuizUp’s traction come from? What did you do right?
It’s funny. We put a lot of viral hooks in the game. We tried to follow all the best practices. Have a strong invite system. Have strong sharing mechanisms. After we launched, we saw stratospheric growth right out of the gate. But people weren’t use any of those well-thought-out viral mechanisms. People were downloading the game, 99 percent of the time, because they tried the game, they had that moment of ‘wow,’ and they told people about the game.
This is still true today. Even when you have your market saturated with user acquisition and all these Instagram ads and everyone pushing things to you, in the end, if you make a good enough product that people want to share with their friend and play with their friends, that is the winning formula.
If QuizUp wasn’t a real-time multiplayer game, and users just answered trivia questions against a computer, do you think it could have still had the same virality that came with word of mouth?
I think it can work in both ways. If you add value to a product by having friends join, the reason is you’re making your own experience better by having friends there. Instagram is a great example. As you told others about it, you also grew your audience. When you got people on Instagram, you were not only giving them a good experience but getting more viewers and likes and enhancing your own experience by getting others to play.
So, in other words, one of the keys to getting word-of-mouth traction on a product is to make sure that there’s something in it for the one spreading the word?
Yes, and I also think that some sort of vanity metrics or comparison is really key to this. I’ve seen a lot of these hyper-casual games get super viral among young people because of this. What I’ve noticed is that young people will be playing a game at school or something, and the other kids will see them playing. These hyper casual games are always designed to look so easy, and it makes people think they could do better. There’s this competition that forms where friends think they can earn more points than each other, and that’s how these things really grow.
And the same goes for likes on Instagram. One of our strongest urges is somehow having comparison. This is where QuizUp, for example, really excelled. You were able to play different kinds of trivia, but also get a very strong indicator of how good you were based on your city or or compared your friends. And I think this is a strong motivation for us to to play and share with others. So, it not only made the app stickier for individual users but it also kind of had a built in virality to it.
This is when Fridriksson started noticing something interesting. The trends he saw were that there are two different kinds of users on QuizUp. One user focuses on the trivia and competing to get the highest scores. But QuizUp had built-in social functions in the game, where you could invite friends and meet new people.
The team realized there was a certain type of player that was using those and meeting new people. In fact, Fridriksson said there were at least a dozen weddings of people who met on QuizUp that the team was aware of. He was even invited to one of them via Skype.
The people that used the communication features had retention numbers that were way, way better than the other users. You can’t grow tired of talking to people. You can grow tired of a game, and there’s always a new game to go to. But if there’s one thing that people in this day and age need more of and want more of, it’s personal connection and communication. It’s something we’ve seen time and time again. The introduction of smartphones has shown us that loneliness is on the rise. Most of what you do on your phone is solo.
It sounds like you had a decision to make. No game is immune to getting boring. Every game has to deal with churn in some respect. So you had to decide between focusing on user acquisition or focusing on retaining users.
We felt like we were battling this game retention battle that every gaming company was dealing with. But we’re more than just a game. People are meeting each other and the categories and topics really created a great place to meet new people based on your interests. And we were seeing social networks like Facebook who just didn’t have to deal with this kind of retention problem. The retention numbers for a social network like Facebook were in a totally different league than games. In games, we’re focused on Day 1 retention, Day 7 retention and Day 30 retention. Facebook is thinking about first year retention. And this comes back to communication and personal connection.
So, based on that, and because we had this moment where we had a lot of users, and a lot of categories to act as connectors, that was when we started running in the direction of becoming a social network, because at that point in time there wasn’t really anything like that.
Did you feel like pushing into social was the right call? Do you consider it a success?
I would consider it a success. I think a lot of the decisions we made with QuizUp were the right ones. There were a lot of wins and failures along the way. If you could boil down one thing that didn’t work, it was that we just didn’t manage to monetize this. It’s a tale as old as time, for these platforms. We never went heavy on advertising. I had a little bit of disdain for too much advertising. If you play mobile games with ads, you know they pop up all the time. And I didn’t think that was a nice product or a good user experience. But in the end, what happened is that we didn’t make enough money.
So we decided to go in a way that we thought could make us more money. I was working with NBC on a TV show around the QuizUp model. That show had huge monetization potential.
Hold on. Let’s slow down for a second. I want to hear about the NBC deal, but there had to be a monetization strategy before NBC. What was it?
Well, because we were interested-based, we thought our audience would be very valuable. We already know what you’re interested in. At the time, the programmable ad networks just weren’t equipped to make this kind of distinction between users. They just throw in any available ads. And that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I didn’t want people to be bombarded with brands that they didn’t care about.
Instead, we got into advertising partnerships with some major corporations. We did an integration with Google Maps around a geography-based quiz, and we did one with Coca-Cola around the FIFA World Cup. They did really well and we made a lot of money, but the problem with this is that it just wasn’t scalable.
At this time, I was still quite a novice in a lot of this, and I just didn’t think about monetization. This is probably my biggest… If there was one thing I should be more passionate about, it was how to monetize. We had more than 100 million users and we never succeeded in monetizing that in any significant way.
This inability to monetize pushed Plain Vanilla to seek out a new revenue model entirely. Remembering the success of Twilight and bearing in mind that the ‘franchise’ is the next step on the mobile gaming totem pole, Fridriksson found himself in meetings with NBC to launch a trivia gameshow.
Fridriksson explained that gameshows are traditionally lucrative for networks, with minimal lift and high ROI. The idea was that viewers could play along with the game show on their own phone, with the chance to win up to $1 million. For Fridriksson, it was the ultimate exposure for the app and it would provide some much needed financial relief for the firm.
The team developed a pilot, which got the green light. Fridriksson recalls being wooed by the glitz and glamour of it all: dining with executives in the French Riviera, attending Cannes, and hosting a party for the launch of the show where QuizUp gave a raffle winner a Tesla Model S.
“It was quite an experience for me,” said Fridriksson. “All the money and all the power of these networks from the highest level. I was working with the highest level you could. It was pretty exciting. Especially for a young person like me. I had had some success with QuizUp, but [not like this].”
Plain Vanilla had little runway left, but the gameshow deal would solve all of that. Until it didn’t. Without much warning or reason, NBC pulled out of the deal, said Fridriksson. It was done via email. He says, even to this day, he doesn’t know what went wrong.
Did you know in that moment that it was over? Or was there still some hope left that you could turn things around?
I knew. I remember. I was on a hike when I got the news and I had pretty bad reception. When I got back I called my PR people and I just told them that we’d have to do a lot of layoffs. I just knew we couldn’t responsibly continue. There would be no chance to get additional funding at that point, especially because we had already had to do some emergency funding requests to Glu, the company that ended up acquiring us.
And this is probably the hardest time in my professional career, maybe apart from the time when The Moogies failed completely, but the stakes were so much higher this time.
At one point, QuizUp had more than 100 million users. It had raised $40 million from the likes of Sequoia, Greycroft, and Tencent. It sold to Glu Mobile for a reported $7.5 million.
I’m sure it’s hard to identify what you could have done differently without knowing what happened with the NBC deal. But obviously, one piece of it is that you probably should have been thinking about monetization in 2011 or 2012.
Yes.
It’s the one major thing that could have prevented a lot of what went wrong. But is there another layer to that where, if you hadn’t put all your eggs in one basket… Did you have to develop and hire at that rate with that focus?
Probably not. When you’re experiencing that kind of hyper growth, your hirings will not be as well thought out as they are when you’re growing at a slower rate. But sometimes it’s necessary to be able to scale up. And I think in many ways, we did that pretty well. We had terrific morale and terrific culture at the company. I don’t think we grew too fast or anything.
I just think we might have lost the mission of making the whole concept sustainable. It felt like there was an endless amount of money that I could get from different VCs. Because when the game blows up, the VC community just went crazy. They were calling me in the middle of the night, inviting me to be picked up by a private place to have a round in Las Vegas. It was just absolutely crazy.
And I enjoyed it! You know, I’ve been at the other end of the table for such a long time and suddenly, these big VC guys were just begging to get their time in and be able to give me money. At the same time, we were getting a lot of acquisition offers. Some were from very big gaming companies for big amounts. They would fly over to Iceland to meet with me. And I just said, ’no, I’m going to ride this out.’
There are some tactical things here that went wrong that we’ve talked about. One is monetization. The other is making the right decisions around allocating resources and hedging your bets. Not putting all your eggs in one basket. But it sounds to me that, throughout the whole experience, there was also a level of hubris involved. I hope that doesn’t come off as offensive, but maybe there was some overconfidence. If you were talking to you ten years ago, knowing everything that would happen… ‘you’re going to make this smash hit of a game, you’re going to get calls from VCs trying to fly you out to Vegas and you’re going to give away a Tesla.’ What do you say to that young founder to protect him against the emotional side of it that can make you feel like nothing can touch you?
I think it’s boring advice but, just don’t forget the fundamentals. Don’t forget the fundamentals that your product has to be sustainable. Everything else is a bonus. It would have been great to put a lot of effort into the NBC deal, but when you’re putting all your eggs into one basket, especially in a basket you don’t have any control over… When you asked why NBC deal failed, it could have been… ‘This is entertainment.’ It’s very prickly. It could have been a variety of things. Maybe the wrong person wasn’t in the right mood when they saw the pilot. I don’t know…
I think your point is that it’s random.
Yes, it’s random. But I think it comes down to two things. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket. And try to work on the things you control. That’s one of the biggest things. We could have spent time on the app trying to monetize it and there were many ways to do that. I can think of lots of ways we could have been smart on monetization. We decided to bat on something that was so much farther away and had more glamour to it, I’ll admit. And maybe a bit of, as you said, hubris.
That doesn’t guarantee it would have been a totally different outcome. I just know the feeling when you’ve been working on a deal for such a long time, and putting millions of dollars into developing this, and just by one stroke of an email, it breaks down from under you. It’s a very tough experience to go through, and with all the layoffs and the other things that go with it.
For you emotionally, the outcome might not have been any different, but the way you felt about it might have.
Absolutely. However, you might think that going through this experience I would have lots of regrets. But I honestly do not have those. I honestly have no regrets. I could have sold the company at an early stage for a lot of money. But then I would not experience these things. I think it’s something that money can hardly buy. I think experiencing these kinds of lessons is something you can’t read about or be told about. It’s a part of your journey as a person to go through that. In the end, going through this roller coaster of emotions, extreme success and bitter disappointment, is what’s making me who I am today and is really helping me make right decisions with a new company.
In February, Fridriksson returned to the arena with the launch of TeaTime. The gaming studio, while still focused on producing fun, casual mobile games, is even more focused on building out a technology platform. With TeaTime, players can compete against one another while video or audio-chatting in real time. Users who opt for video chat can choose to layer on AR filters so that they can still express themselves without worrying about their appearance on camera.
The company, which raised $9 million, launched a simple racing game, called HyperSpeed, as a prototype. After gauging response and testing the market, TeaTime recently launched what it considers its first real title, OneWord.
I can’t help but notice that, for someone who created one of the most popular mobile games of the past decade, your main product isn’t a game at all, but a platform. Can you share some of the early thinking around that?
For some reason, bringing people together through gaming seems to be my mission in life. When I saw that there were marriages and friendships from QuizUp, it’s one of my most memorable achievements in my life. I just felt super proud about creating something that would give people such joy, and bring groups of people closer to each other. And that was really the inspiration for TeaTime.
I’m a big gamer myself. I’ve loved games since I was playing Cyberpunk 2020 and Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. And one of the biggest value propositions of games in general is not the game itself, but the communication. When you would open up a board game with your family, that would be fun, but a big part of that is the communication you had with others. Games have always acted as a kind of icebreaker or conversational lubricant, for lack of a better word.
This is very true with video games. People playing PlayStation or Nintendo NES, they would be with their friend on their couch. You’d be playing the game, but a big part was the feedback and talking to the other person. As mobile games have taken the world by storm, they’re just incredibly isolating and basically promoting loneliness. You’re always playing mobile games alone. Even when you’re playing multiplayer games, it usually never feels like you’re playing with someone else.
So, a couple of executives from QuizUp came together a couple years ago, and we decided we wanted to take this one extra step that hadn’t been done before, and that’s mixing people’s real identity and feedback and video with other people’s video stream while playing a casual game. And I think we’re the first company in the world to do that.
I guess, because of my history, it was relatively easy for us to get funding for the new company.
And what are you learning from the new platform?
We’re seeing that engagement, on this very simple Scrabble game called OneWord, that people that actually play against friends or add friends on the network, they have almost 2x or 3x better retention. Our theory is, almost every type of game, is going to be more fun if you’re playing with a real person. Because everything else is basically just like playing Solitaire.
Another thing we’ve also experienced is that people that are playing with friends, they like to have the camera on. And I have experienced this myself on OneWord. I have lots of friends abroad that I always feel like I don’t communicate enough with. When we were doing beta tests of OneWord I’d invite them to it, we’d play a couple games, and then we’d just hang on the game chatting for thirty minutes, using it basically as a video conferencing system.
In other words, the game isn’t as relevant as the communication?
What we aim to create and what we’re seeing is that playing with video is a very different experience than playing someone you don’t know or playing the computer.
Another thing we’ve discovered recently, and something we’re thinking about with our next title, is that strangers playing together, of course, really don’t want to have the video camera on. There is a big danger zone there. Instead, what we built into OneWord and what we’re building into our platform much. More, is that you can actually be an avatar that can show real emotion. It’s kind of like… have you seen the Animojis on the iPhone?
Yes.
So, yeah, it’s exactly like that. I remember when I first saw the Animoji and I just loved it. It was so much fun and I remember it was a big theme of the keynote. However, no one uses it. You might send one or two messages and laugh, but there’s no real application for it.
What we’ve been working on is building a truly cool avatar system where you can be yourself, and it mimics your facial expressions and you can talk through it. And this way, you can play a game against anyone in the world where you can see an avatar representation of that person. No one is scared of showing something they shouldn’t, and it’s just a fantastic experience!
Creating that alter ego in the video games where you can take your avatar with you and play other games, and earn medals. Creating this social marketplace where you can add friends and see them as their avatars, I think this is where gaming is going.
You’re already seeing hints of this. For example, in the Oculus Horizon. It’s this big avatar-based virtual world. That’s VR but it serves the same purpose. If you’re able to see your opponent, see him laughing, talk to him, see him smile or frown when you do something fun, it’s communication on a totally different level. This is where I think we are currently leading the way when it comes to gaming. We have a host of new games coming out next year that I can’t wait for you to see.
OK, so let’s talk about lessons learned from QuizUp and how they’re being applied to TeaTime. I think question one is, how are you thinking about monetization and how often are you thinking about monetization?
We’ve got funding, so we really don’t think about monetization.
[Long, awkward silence]
I’m joking! You know, trivia games are historically hard to monetize. But, the biggest lesson I learned with QuizUp, as I said before, is that you shouldn’t put all your eggs into the same basket. And that’s 100 percent what we’re gearing up right now. So we have five games in active development right now and they all have different monetization schemes based on the types of games that they are. Because different games have different types of in-app purchases and monetization based on what game they are. We’re basically following some of the best-tested monetization schemes in gaming, but adding a layer of communication on top of it.
So, yes, you can be certain of that. TeaTime is really thinking about monetizing the games on our platform.
It sounds like it’s not just about the games, though. You also have the avatars themselves that you could monetize, maybe branded avatars, and then you also have the games.
100 percent. We have the game-specific monetization and the platform-specific monetization.
What about third-party games? Is that a future revenue model?
Absolutely. We are doing this as an SDK. And we are working with third-party developers using the platform And this is beautiful! Because what we’ve been doing for the past three years has not been without its pain. We’re doing something completely new. And a small developer could never build this, for one game. What we’re offering with the TeaTime Live platform is that you can create a game in Unity and plug it in, and skin and modify it, but you’d have a full game from start to finish with all the on boarding, profiles, matchmaking, avatars, camera, leaderboards, everything packed into our SDK.
If you’re a gaming company, how do you measure success? Is there a benchmark that is true for all mobile gaming companies around engagement, user acquisition, retention?
I mean, in the end it’s always about the money. It has to be, basically, that the lifetime value of your customer has to be higher than the cost of acquiring the user. If you can spend less money on getting a new user than the amount of money the average user brings in, then you have a sustainable business.
There was a time when ‘gamifying’ something was a brand new idea. And now it seems that everything, even utility apps, are gamified in some way. When you look at the next decade, what does gamification mean going forward? I mean, if everything’s gamified, then ‘gamification’ doesn’t really mean anything anymore. It’s just how we build things. What’s the next level of that?
My prediction is what we see in many scifi films like Ready Player One and on platforms like Facebook’s Oculus Horizon and on TeaTime, is that people will want to have their alter egos as part of their gaming experiences online. And I think that alter ego will not only be a part of gaming apps but social apps or even utility apps.
There are a lot of initiatives around this. You see Snap with their Bitmoji. Everyone is trying to be the king of that alter ego inside the physical world.
Once, an HR person told me that the last generation, the one that grew up on consoles and video games, are different than the other generations. They always need some instant feedback. This is true for work or relationships. Because they’re used to playing video games where they would either win the level or get ‘game over’, and get that instant feedback from the games.
That’s part of the reason people want to gamify everything. You want to get someone telling you that you did good. You just did a promo code? Let’s do it with rainbows and unicorns because you’re so great!
I think, if you look at the younger generations that are not only raised on video games but also on social media, that this need for public approval, in the forms of likes or views, is probably going to really impact everything going forward. Whether it’s in the workplace, or gaming, or applications, or whatever. To get that crowd of people telling you that you did good.
We’re already seeing this in applications like Asana and Slack. Now it’s all about getting likes or hearts. They implement the social gamification of likes into almost everything we do.
Going forward, for the generations that are really used to getting this crowd-generated number of likes, this is going to impact more things later on.
There has always been some amount of luck involved in finding success in mobile gaming. Do you think that luck is more or less of a factor now? Is there more data and best practices out there to have more control over success?
I think the chances of going viral are less now than they were ten years ago. The market was less saturated than it is now. However, I still think that games are created as a work of art. It’s like saying, is it harder or easier to make a best-selling novel now that there is better market research around target groups? Sure. You can collect the data from the last ten years to see what successful games have in common. There are websites that do that, with a check list. You must have a daily challenge and a daily reward and this or that type of system.
But because we’re humans and we are creative, whether things become truly popular is all having a great product, good timing, and some luck.
No one knows the formula for virality. It’s not possible. If someone knew it, they’d do it again and again. There’s an element of luck and creativity and some spark.