Building Better Worlds

The game is performing pretty well in the US. It's the 14th highest grossing app, and the number one grossing crime game on Android right now. And we recently passed the 400,000 registered accounts milestone. It's got four to five stars on 5500 reviews or so.

Very engaged players, which is the goal here. We push new features every couple of weeks.

Overall, we felt that people primarily would fight each other, and I would say that has definitely turned out to be the case. We thought when we launched the game it would be every man for himself - you against the world, out on the street, fighting for a landmark.

And now we've pulled people together into small street gangs of four, where they can wear the same clothes and get a bonus. We ran an East vs. West Coast bank heist mission for two weeks, where everyone in the gang went out and robbed banks, and that money would be pooled. Every time you rob a bank you make $400 or $500, and over two weeks our game community stole $8.5 billion.

It proves that the next step is to pull our players into regions and cities. It's going pretty well. We're very happy with that.

The biggest thing for us with regards to location is that we're striving to make this a very social experience. Social gaming is kind of a misnomer, just because it's on Facebook. The social experience in social gaming is really sending each other Facebook requests and gifts. With us, we're actually having these people interact with each other, and find each other according to location. Also, with our gang feature they have live chat, if they wear the same things they get bonuses.

The things that people engage with are not necessarily games. I mean, they do, but I think games are often a conduit to interaction with each other. That's where you get the real long-term engagement, is those relationships.

I spent over a decade making console games, where you're generally trained into perfection. One of Microsoft's milestones is 'ZBR', right: zero bug writing. It's a very different mentality.

So we launched the game knowing that the US was populated with 700,000 locations, the core gameplay feedback loop and progression curve was in, the leaderboard system was done, and the movement of virtual goods was complete, so for us it was good enough. Let's get it out there.

It's free-to-play, it grows quickly and virally, and then we have a feature roadmap for the things that, I guess, if we sat around for a year or two years we would have shipped this perfect product. But it's great to build it with players, as opposed to sitting around guessing for a year or two.

Ultimately, in console, whatever you're doing, the thing you're concerned about the most is the players. You dedicate every minute of every day to the experience they'll end up with. You can't teach that to people, and that's been the easiest part of moving to mobile, that mentality, whether it's next-gen graphics or not; that sort of commitment to engaging players and community is very like-for-like.

It was a big decision for us, but we felt that it has a growing user-base; there are actually more Android devices out there than iOS. On top of that fact, it's also much more wide open. There are a lot of companies jostling for one of the top-ten highest grossing spots on iOS.

On Android we felt it would be easier to stand out, and we also felt that it was under-served - because of the big focus on iOS the Android players really deserved something better than what was out there. And to be honest, it has been really great working with the Android team as well; they're actually featuring us on the marketplace this week.

When we started back in February/March it was pretty immature. The payment system hadn't come through, so that was a real gamble for us. But we could see where Android was going, the price-points were pretty amazing for most Android devices, and the market was huge. But generally you looked at the marketplace and it was full of crap, really... We were aiming for real high quality, and that sort of console approach to QA and support, and that has paid off for us. Android has turned out to be a win, but earlier in the year it was a risk.

But iOS is just behind. We're going to be out in November on iOS in North America and the UK, and all of our gameplay is client agnostic so they'll be able to fight against Android players.

If you look at review scores on the App Store, the 1 out of 5 reviews are generally for force closes and crashes. Those reviews on Android tend to be from people who got piss-poor support, and a lot of our five star reviews on the marketplace are saying it's because we're heavily engaged. And I think that's awesome, because players will forgive some of the problems you have if you just get back to them and the updates are consistent.

You're asking people for their time. Even though it's free-to-play you're still asking them for their time. I know it's a cliché, but it's so important.

So, in general we are a geo-gaming studio, but we feel like we want to bring a lot of great content to our users, and build a brand around what we're trying to do. The second part of our strategy is to produce a geo-gaming network, and in January we'll be opening that up to third-parties. We really feel that the hard work we put in for about six months building our geo-layer and our geo-backend, that we can really accelerate the whole space for geo-gaming, and allow people to build faster, better, more high-polished games without worrying about how to build a geo-index or a geo-spatial database.

Yes, that's what we're trying to do, and our contribution to that is the R2 Network. We're actively looking for third-party developers, and we're already talking to a couple. I think we'll see some very interesting results early next year.