Kixeye is a different sort of social gaming company, making titles like Desktop Defender, Backyard Monsters, and Battle Pirates that appeal to core gamers. As Kixeye CEO Will Harbin detailed, however, it pays dividends for the company.
“On average, our games monetize 10x to 20x per user what a Zynga game would do,” said Harbin. “It’s just a natural result of the product and how people love the product. We didn’t start at 2 times what Zynga is doing and say, ‘OK, how do we get up to 10 or 20 times ‘ It started that way without a lot of optimization. We don’t focus on gaming the user, we just focus on adding content and features that people will think are fun. The core mechanics of the game resonate well with people, it’s fully synchronous, it’s fully real-time, there’s action, you customize and build your ships and take them out to battle, and you’re engaging with the other player. It’s not just a battle summary screen that says you won or lost, then go back to your spreadsheet interface and manipulate whatever troops you’re trying to build. It plays and feels like a real game, or what I would consider a real game. We have all those elements in there, then you allow users to invest in the little world that they’re building and their empire. You leave it turned on 24/7 and people tend to come back and really love the experience.”
Getting attention for Kixeye has actually been easy on Facebook. “We definitely do marketing. We always want more quality users. We do hyper-targeted focused user acquisition. Facebook is a great platform to do that. They’ve got an awesome ad platform where you can really zero in on the demographic that works for your platform,” Harbin said. “We’ve changed our advertising strategy over the last year so it’s very focused and we only purchase quality. There’s some natural rise in costs, but most of it’s just a factor of how thoughtful we are with the kind of user that we want to target.”
When asked about competing with console games, Harbin said, “Competition is a funny thing. Previous businesses would be laser-focused on what the competition is doing because it had a very real cost in terms of your market opportunity. In this case, gamers play lots of games. Some games are going to resonate with some users and some games aren’t. I’m not worried that some competitor is going to come in and put us out of business overnight, the space is just too big and people are always looking for new forms of entertainment. It’d be a little bit different if I were Zynga and my whole business plan was predicated on ‘I need hundreds of millions of players to make this thing work.’ I don’t need hundreds of millions of players, I have just over 4 million a month and we’re running a very successful business. I don’t necessarily need to expand my broader playing base. In terms of competition, what I worry about are the copycats. I worry about companies like Kabam just doing the same thing over and over again, and not adding any innovation into the space. It’s sad, because there are hundreds of resources being sucked into doing that when they could be working on more interesting, creative titles and adding more diversity to the ecosystem. That’s what I worry about in terms of competition.”
Source: IndustryGamers {link no longer active}
