That’s cool with three or five of your close friends, but having to draw for 50 people gets a bit overwhelming. Unlike Scopely’s Dice with Buddies where a round is literally a couple seconds, Drawing took quite an investment of time and thought. But unlike binging on Breaking Bad episodes on NetFlix, when you were “done” on Draw Something, there were a ton of opponents waiting for you to draw back. They played non-stop, during class, over night – it was this incredible social binge event. When Draw Something first came out, it was like crack. #2 Sometimes there CAN be too much of a good thing People binged on Draw Something similar to the same extent people now binge on NetFlix – games now have to figure out how to not let the player get sick of the game and burn out Trivia Crack was built on the success of its Spanish-language version predecessor Preguntados which was built on the success of it’s Scrabble-like game Adworded which was built on the company’s past experience as a third-party developer. And that’s about the same for every indie darling that makes it big, the latest being today’s #1 hit Trivia Crack by Etermax. Neither of these game ideas were a success overnight. SongPop too had an earlier incarnation – can you believe The Crazy Cow Music Quiz? Obviously we ditched the cow, and a bunch of pre-game power ups, opting for a simpler and more direct game play. Before SongPop, an initial iteration was The Crazy Cow Music Quiz The iterations on mobile were huge: In 2012 doing real-time mobile play wasn’t an option so we shifted into asynchronous game play the clock and “winning” or “losing was eliminated and typing out your guess on a mobile device was a pain, so we shifted to a sort of scramble-like listing of letters from which to make your guess. We ported the game to Facebook which greatly expanded the audience, peaking at about 2.1 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) – but that was a mere blip compared to what we saw when we jumped to mobile. Before Draw Something on mobile, there was Draw My Thing on OMGPOP – a synchronous game where you had a timer to draw and other users tried to be the first to guess the word you were drawing Drawing with your mouse sort of sucked but it was fun in real time – you had to beat the timer and draw well enough that others in the group could guess it. Two of the biggest hits I’ve been associated with (Draw Something and SongPop) came after years of iteration.ĭraw Something started off as a real-time flash game Draw My Thing on the now defunct site (but you can still play the embedded game on sites out there if you are looking for it). #1 Overnight success takes years to perfect So here’s a couple things I’ve observed along the way: And here in 2015 I’m watching the market shift yet again as mobile game developers are now turning to traditional brand marketing by spending tens of millions on TV ads. After getting acquired by Zynga, I jumped crosstown to FreshPlanet to grow and monetize SongPop as well as try to develop more social causal mobile hits. I jumped into OMGPOP in 2010 as the product lead for a Facebook game we delved into mobile apps in 2011 as the market shifted and then I was fortunate enough to be part of the crazy explosion of our game Draw Something. I’ve spent the last four years on quite the ride, so pardon the long absence. OMGPOP’s first Facebook game was Cupcake Corner
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