Getting Developers To #1 In The App Store

Scopely is a well-funded mobile gaming startup with a wide range of talent, and the company is both producing its own games and publishing games for other developers. CEO Walter Driver spoke with [a]list daily recently to discuss the company’s growth and its strategies for marketing in an increasingly crowded mobile gaming market.

Scopely’s been quite successful at getting games discovered. Rocket Jump, a team in New Zealand Scopely started working with towards the end of 2012 is a case in point.

“When we released their game Mini Golf Matchup,” said Driver, “It was the number one app on the iPhone in 29 countries within ten hours of launch, which was incredible.”

Driver believes that Scopely can find the right developers and the right products to create more such successes.

“We believe that there are a lot of game studios out there that are capable of creating really compelling products, but they’re going to need assistance in distribution technology and monetization funds to compete at the highest levels,” said Driver.

As he puts it, Scopely is trying to create “an exclusive network for the best independent developers where we can provide them with world class distribution and monetization expertise, as well as a technology platform that scales and allows them to get their product to market faster.”

Scopely is working with developers such as Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions, which is relatively new to mobile, as well as companies like Big Cave that won Apple’s Showpiece Game of the Year Award in 2012. Developers are looking for ways to get mobile products discovered, and Scopely’s audience growth and technology platform is appealing.

“We’ve been hearing from hundreds of developers from across the world over the course of this year,” Driver noted.

Of course, it’s not as easy as just putting a game into the App Store, even if you have a large audience. Driver explained what Scopely offers to developers.

“There’s really three parts of what we do for our developers,” he said. “One, we provide a server-side infrastructure platform that enables them to get to market faster. We have an API for all kinds of social functions that’s very well optimized already, and can help them develop much faster. Then, if you’re seeing 10,000 requests a second, Scopely can handle that size of audience.”

Creating a large audience for a new game isn’t just a matter of showing it to players of your current games.

“We’re always looking at innovative paid marketing channels,” Driver said. “It’s a very competitive landscape. But we also believe that you’re not going to build a transformational company by buying your users one at a time. Especially not in an area that there’s so much competition that any market that might be there might evaporate quickly, because it works for other developers as well. So we spend a lot more time on building products that people want to talk about and share with their friends. Mini Golf received over 130,000 reviews in the first eight days after it launched. It’s one of the most reviewed apps in the history of the App Store in the first week. These are the kind of products that elicit a strong response from people who say ‘play me in this game.’ That drives a much more sustainable degree of installs than paid banner ads, for example.”

As with other mobile developers, tablets are an important market for Scopely.

“The growth trajectory of the iPad specifically and the penetration that we’re seeing there is mind boggling in how fast it’s growing,” Driver said. “It’s one of the most exciting platforms for game developers in a really long time.”

Driver says that tablets have “significantly different play patterns than phones,” noting that “people tend to be playing tablet games when they’re committed to a recreation session for more than just a few minutes, so it lends itself to much more immersive experiences than you might be engaged with on your phone.” Driver said the bottom line for Scopely is that “both platforms are hugely exciting, and tablets offer great monetization potential as well because of that increase in engagement.”

Scopely has a broad range of expertise on its management team from a wide variety of companies and industries. The inference is that Scopely may branch out into other areas.

“It’s an astute observation that we have people from backgrounds like social product design, ad tech, and the video entertainment industry,” Driver said. “We can bring the knowledge of how to compete on a business standpoint or from a distribution standpoint or a monetization standpoint, bringing big brands like Vitamin Water or Starbucks to the table.”

The growth in mobile will continue strongly in the near future, Scopely believes.

“In the next 12-18 months there’s going to be really rapid growth in the smartphone market,” Driver said, “But it’s going to be primarily in developing and emerging economy. From a monetization standpoint those markets are not as mature. I think folks that are innovative in how to generate revenue from users in the developing world are going to do very well.”