![]() ![]() That's because launching a free-to-play game is not a chance to move on to the next project, but just the beginning. The game has only been in development for a little under nine months, but it's already ready to roll, and has been racking up responsive users in markets like Canada and New Zealand.Īnd it will only get better from here. But right then, she noticed the time and promptly left the meeting room to travel one floor below - to the Backyard Monsters mobile team - so that they could prepare for the game to launch in yet another market when the clocked ticked 11 that morning. "I worked on one game for three years," she said with slight exasperation. She ditched the realm of major game publishing and development because it moved painfully slow, and involved years of working in a bubble only to release a game with little to no reassurance that it would be well-received. Shaw left rival social games company Ngmoco to work for Kixeye, and previously spent years at EA working for its subsidiary Maxis, the creator of SimCity. "I have not met a single person here who is not a gamer," said Caryl Shaw, Backyard Monsters' executive producer. For Kixeye's goal lies in convincing not just kids, but older players - those with a craving to play who perhaps don't have the resources or time to invest in hundreds of dollars of hardware - that it's a team of serious gamers making serious games, not cow-clickers. It has what it describes as a long-standing feud, both legal and philosophical, with Zynga over the free-to-play model and the ways in which the crumbling Farmville-creator has tarnished the moniker. ![]() Free-to-play, thanks in part to the success of Facebook games, is now a model adopted by even the largest developers, from Valve with Dota 2 and EA with Star Wars: The Old Republic to Sony Entertainment with its latest version of EverQuest.Īnd at its core, it's still as anti-Zynga as the most traditional of gaming companies. It's an updated and touch screen-oriented iteration of Kixeye's most successful browser-based game, a Facebook tower defense title that launched the developer to the forefront of the burgeoning browser-based free-to-play market and still has millions of monthly users. The year after, it broke $100 million.Īnd on Wednesday, Kixeye pushed out its very first mobile game, Backyard Monsters: Unleashed for iOS. In 2011, it posted 11 times more revenue than the year before. It now occupies five entire floors of a towering Bush Street skyscraper and has ballooned from around 100 employees roughly two years ago to more than 500. But for a six-year business built off the backbone of Facebook social gaming, it's become a leader in taking the image of free-to-play away from tacky gambling and farming with friends and closer to the hardcore community interested in strategic combat games. The company is still very much a startup it doesn't have its own building or a workforce of more than 9,000 like major publisher Electronic Arts, from which numerous Kixeye employees have jumped ship. Once inside, old-school arcade machines pop up around every corner, and row upon row of vertical code-filled monitors are paired with white walls of concept art for one of the many titles in the development pipeline. Military sound bites blast out of the speakers of its bunker-themed elevator waiting hall, a space awash in glowing red light and protected by an actual armed guard. SAN FRANCISCO - Walking through Kixeye's headquarters here in downtown San Francisco, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in the offices of a triple-A studio. ![]()
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