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Growing Pains

Innogames co-founder Hendrik Klindworth on the importance of quality, catching Bigpoint, and the restrictive nature of Facebook

"Our aim is to bring in the best quality of gamers. The people have to find us. You cannot wait for only for virality, so our main target is to find the right places to communicate, as cheaply as possible, with as many high quality gamers as possible," he says.

"There are differences in the markets. In the UK market [people don't know that high quality browser games are available], but when you go to France or Germany it is the other way around. People do know what the quality is - perhaps because the market is driven by German companies - but they do now understand what the quality is, what they can expect out of the games."

"In the last few years there were a lot of Asian grinder games coming up. For this type of game I think there is still a market, but people are sick of this. It doesn't have the gameplay they need, it doesn't have the game design that is needed in the Western hemisphere. Right now, the goal for success is to develop the right game for each market, and have good localisation. That means much more than translation."

The fact that people want to enter our market and we don't want to enter theirs speaks for itself

"That is a big challenge for us in the future: that we have the right games for South America, as well as Europe, and for North America, and the Far East."

However, while global expansion is a priority for the future, in the near term the focus is on growth in Europe. InnoGames' home market contributes by far the largest share of its annual revenue, so cracking America, Brazil, China, and the other markets mentioned in our lengthy discussion will not take precedence over closing in on the current European market leader, Bigpoint.

"The most important task is to strengthen our audience with new games and in our existing games," Klindworth says. "We will have the biggest growth still in Europe. It's a huge market, and we can get bigger here. The home market, in absolute numbers, is the highest growth."

But change is certainly coming. InnoGames' meteoric rise has coincided with the rapid growth of the browser market in general, and the future is certain to involve two things that could upset the successful balance that the company has struck so far: rising production budgets, and the entry into the market of the many publishers for whom digital content is an integral part of their strategy.

"When we made Tribal Wars back in 2003 we had basically no budget, whereas today there are browser games that have a production budget above €1 million, or at the very least several hundred-thousand," Klindworth says.

"I think that, in the future, every audience will demand high production values. You will see that in all social game development, all browser-based game development; the production budgets, they rise up."

"I would say that it's not really negative for us, because the revenues within the games also increase. Of course, I wouldn't like to have million dollar budgets for browser-based game development, but we are still far away from that."

However, the threat from the sort of multi-billion companies that currently dominate the console market may not be so far away. Companies like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Capcom and others have been dabbling in social and mobile development for some time, but this year saw these new markets folded seamlessly into their overall strategy.

It seems more a matter of 'when' rather than 'if' that free-to-play browser games become as essential to new product launches as iOS and Facebook games are now. But if Klindworth is at all concerned about InnoGames' place in the future of the browser market, he certainly hides it well.

"The fact that people want to enter our market and we don't want to enter theirs speaks for itself."

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Matthew Handrahan avatar

Matthew Handrahan

Editor-in-Chief

Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.