Bigpoint's Nils-Holger Henning
The CCO on Brazil, Battlestar and stereoscopic 3D in browsers
At the moment we're in the process of handing our products to Apple, to get approval for listing in iTunes. We understand that we need our existing portfolio of top games - Seafight, DarkOrbit, Farmerama, Zoomumba - on iPhone, Android devices and the iPad.
The next step is really that we'll develop new games cross-platform - they'll work on mobile from the beginning. For example, take a game like Toon Racers. That's a racing game that's a little similar in style to Mario Kart - it's going to launch simultaneously on PC, iPad, iPhone and Android.
Battlestar is a better start than we had with anything, ever
From the technology side, the issues are mainly that the games we develop in Flash won't work on Apple devices - so there we needed to find a way around. Once we developed in Unity, it's no problem to port.
But we find that the biggest issue is in fact the game mechanics. It's vital that if you're playing a game like DarkOrbit on PC and I'm playing on the iPad, I shouldn't have any advantage over you. It's a balancing issue between devices - you mustn't be able to attack or something within a game more quickly on a mobile device compared to somebody else playing with a mouse.
Yes, that's right. We've defined, within Bigpoint, three divisions - one is called Triple-A, where we develop games like Battlestar Galactica and The Mummy, and we announced at GDC that we're going to make games based on monsters like Frankenstein, from NBC Universal licences.
Then we've got the Core division, that historically made games all developed in Flash - like DarkOrbit and others - and then we've got the Casual Games division that makes Farmerama, Zoomumba and so on. They target a wider audience, and a more female one.
Well, to talk directly, it's the best start we've ever had with a game in Bigpoint's history - and not because we've been putting so much marketing behind it, but because the community has been driving it. They've been so interested in the brand and what's going to happen with the game.
We were talking about the Christmas season earlier, and for us - as a commercial company - we were also thinking about launching the game around then. But we saw some balancing issues within Battlestar, so we decided to postpone it to the beginning of March, for the open beta.
The feedback we've had, the activity inside of the game - from the user behaviour - shows us that we're building one of the next blockbusters in Bigpoint's portfolio.
We think it has a bigger potential than every other game in our portfolio, taken individually.
They're balanced - it's quite interesting. It's between Seafight, Dark Orbit and Farmerama, they're the three blockbusters. The others are coming close but not hitting that level - but what we've seen with Battlestar is a better start than we had with anything, ever.