Games like backyard monsters for pc6/26/2023 ![]() 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |