Rumble Entertainment Aims for Engagement

There have been a large number of game startups in the past five years, most of them focusing on mobile games. One company that’s taken a somewhat different road is Rumble Entertainment, headed by EA veteran Greg Richardson. The company has found success in building a cross-platform action RPG, KingsRoad, that’s been keeping players engaged in the browser, on Facebook and now on mobile platforms.

The [a]listdaily sat down for a long conversation with Richardson about Rumble Entertainment’s evolution and where then entire game industry is headed. Richardson’s perspective as a veteran of console, social, and now mobile games gives him a wide view of where the industry has been and where it might be headed.

How have things been changing for Rumble Entertainment this last year?

2014 has really been about getting to mobile for us. The second piece of news is learning what it takes to build games that are going to last for years and years. KingsRoad we launched into beta in 2013, and we lifted the beta moniker at the very beginning of this year and went into live ops and creating a very high cadence of new content and running events. We’ve really been able to build a nice business there, and we’re really proud of the long-term veteran engagement. We get the vast majority of our engaged veterans playing month after month. That’s really exciting for us because that’s what we set out to do.

What do you see as the most important trends in mobile gaming for 2015?

One of the things that was implied in what you were saying is that the world is quickly moving toward people designing and investing in games that they believe players can play in for four or five years, as opposed to four or five months which I believe characterized the majority of the intention of free-to-play mobile games over the last four or five years.

If you can come up with a game that engages people for a long time, that’s both more profitable and much more satisfying to players.

That last point’s really important. Think about it from the player’s perspective. If they’re constantly getting their interest piqued to play a game that looks really exciting and that they enjoy for a week or two and then leave behind, not only does it mute their desire to try anything new going forward but they just generally get a fatigue. It’s like trying out a bunch of new restaurants, going once or twice and never going back again, it becomes a frustrating exercise. Whereas if you find something you love, it can become part of your life. It becomes a hobby, a passion, a sport, a group, a club you join. That’s really where you’re enriching people. That’s really where the opportunity of games as a service and free-to-play can evolve from the limited experiences we were creating on consoles and PC packaged goods games.

That’s a good way to look at it. You want to create something that becomes part of someone’s life, and it has to be worthy of that. It’s not just a throwaway piece of entertainment.

That’s true. What really separates the game experiences that are capable of becoming part of someone’s life is connecting them with other people that they really enjoy playing with, seeing and interacting with. So the social aspect is absolutely essential. We’re really excited because KingsRoad, after a long labor of getting the game to be a great ground-up mobile experience, it’s finally going to launch on tablets. One of the things that we’re excited about, you kind of hinted at but really didn’t call it out in your article, is that not only is it going to be the first full-blown action roleplaying game to hit mobile devices.

That’s in line with your notion that console and PC games are coming to mobile. But it’s also synchronous multiplayer, and it’s a full world with lots of other players, and you can play in real time with other players. That’s the next dimension that people haven’t broken into with mobile here in the West, which I think is really exciting. You saw Vainglory do that, and look at the number of users they’ve got on a daily basis. It’s something we’ve done to build long-term social glue for the players on Facebook, which is to bring synchronous multiplayer to that system, and now we’re doing it on mobile. I think it’s a real catalyst for this kind of three-to-four-year plus game cycle.

To me, as you have a broader audience available to you, they’re not focused on the platform the way a hardcore console gamer is. The general audience just wants to play the game where they are with what they have, and they don’t really care what brand of tablet, computer, or console it is. They just want to play it wherever they are, and get the experience.

That’s exactly right. You’ve hit on something that I think very few writers and reporters ever note, because you get so caught up into the inside baseball of the industry you can lose sight of the player’s perspective. Somehow I think the game industry believes it’s not held by the same rules that those individuals take to consume movies, music, or books. It’s exactly as you described. I want it to be with me wherever I am, I want it to work correctly, and I want it to be incredibly engaging and fun.

We’re one of the few people that still believe you want to deliver games cross-platform. You’ve seen companies release games on Facebook and then come back and release the game on mobile, but they’re not the same game and it’s not a shared experience. You’ve heard a lot of other people running away from the PC, but the truth is there’s still billions of people using PCs every day, and there’s still billions of people using televisions every day. Now we’ve added mobile devices, but it hasn’t meant that people aren’t watching TV any more or they’re not working on their PCs.

When KingsRoad launches on mobile, it’s fully synchronized and playable across PC and mobile devices. So you can be on your phone — we haven’t launched it yet, but it’s coming in early 2015 — and Evan can be on his tablet, and I can be on a PC, and the three of us can be running on a map together.

See the rest of this interview with Greg Richardson tomorrow on [a]listdaily.