KIXEYE. If you’ve played Backyard Monsters or Battle Pirates, you’ve heard of them. If you’ve ever been to GDC, you’ve seen their recruitment campaigns - the billboards, the taxi-top ads, the signs on the sides of MUNI buses. There was a time when the KIXEYE logo (a chess knight unicorn) was ubiquitous. And that’s because they were growing quickly and hiring like mad. They still are. And talent is hard to come by here in the land of Google and Zynga, which is why KIXEYE has had to be aggressive as well as creative when it comes to talent acquisition. Thus, the video.
If you really want to get a taste of what KIXEYE is all about, you need to see what Executive Producer David Scott calls “The Video.” The KIXEYE recruitment video basically espouses the company’s fundamental dogma in the form of a parody that skewers Bay Area gaming stalwarts EA and Zynga, among others. It’s kind of hilarious, and definitely ballsy. Their send-up of Mark Pincus is more than a shot across Zynga’s bow, it’s a cannonball sent through their topsail, and what it’s saying is we’re not like other gaming studios, we’re different and we’re in it for the long haul.
“First and foremost, we’re a company built by gamers,” says Scott. “And that is deeply embedded into our DNA and culture.”
What’s the most important question asked in any KIXEYE interview? What games are you playing right now, and what is your all-time favorite game and why? This is a company conceived, founded, built and run by actual gamers who were born and raised with controllers and keyboards in their hands. And that, sadly, is not the norm in this industry, which has become so heavily reliant on formula, imitation and data mining that innovation is all but dead. KIXEYE harkens back to an era of developer-owned shops that placed the game first. Profit is (gulp) a secondary concern.
KIXEYE founders Paul Preece and David Scott met at a local LAN party in the UK and immediately hit it off. They were each building Flash games for free-to-play sites like Addicting Games and Kongregate, and had huge early successes with Flash Element TD and Desktop Tower Defense - games built by a single programmer/designer in pure indie fashion. Those games did so well that in 2007, they quit their day jobs to form The Casual Collective, where they built a total of 13 games and a social network that enabled players to form groups and compete with each other on the site.
“I posted Flash Element TD on my website in 2007 and linked it to Stumbledupon.com,” says Scott. “Within a few hours, it received 500,000 visitors and went on to be played by over 100 million people by the end of the year.”
The Casual Collective’s initial business model was based on in-game advertising and though they experimented with subscriptions and micro-transactions, they didn’t see the growth or revenue they had hoped for. But they were learning, and in 2009, made the move to San Francisco to find a CEO that could help the business scale. They hit it off with Will Harbin, an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Trinity Ventures who was looking to start a game company. Harbin, like Scott and Preece, had a burning passion for games - he was the man they were looking for.
This was about the time when social games were blowing up, but Preece, Harbin and Scott were uninspired by the offerings available on Facebook to core gamers.
“We saw that as a huge opportunity with a lot of runway”, Scott says. “We knew there was a winning formula if we were able to deliver on both accessibility and fidelity.”
So they decided to pivot the brand and changed their name to KIXEYE. They also scrapped the advertising-based revenue model and began promoting the sale of speed-ups to players that allowed them to progress faster. In other words, they were selling time. That first year, KIXEYE launched their first two Facebook games, with Preece creating Desktop Defender and Scott focusing on Backyard Monsters. Smash hits. The company was profitable and grew from three to fifty employees that year. The following year, they launched Battle Pirates and War Commander and hit nine figures in revenue. KIXEYE now employees five hundred people worldwide, with four-hundred fifty in San Francisco alone. And they’re still growing strong.
“Our biggest challenge today is to continue hiring high quality talent,” Scott says. “There’s no shortage of opportunities for talented engineers in the Bay Area, and we’re competing against everyone else for these individuals. It’s why we created The Interview video.”
KIXEYE is adamant that quality is their chief concern. They are serious gamers, hell-bent on crafting experiences that not only make money, but that are loved; and that are played by millions of hard-core gamers. They stress gameplay and good old fashion game design over analytics and formulaic re-skins. And it’s working.
How’s this for proof? Three plus years of continuous profitability, 2011 revenue 11x over 2010, 2012 revenue triple that of 2011, 20x higher ARPDAU [Average Revenue Per Daily Average User], engagement [MAU/DAU] is 5x longer than other popular social game and KIXEYE users play more than two sessions per day, one hour and thirty minutes total per session. Folks, that’s staggering. Something is definitely working over there at KIXEYE. Could it be that quality and game design truly matters?
“The vision for KIXEYE is simple,” Scott says. “To build the biggest and most successful game company on the planet, to push the envelope and redefine the intersection of fidelity and accessibility, to create innovative, mind-blowing experiences for competitive gamers. We have never deviated from that strategy.”
Keep in mind that KIXEYE has done all this online. They’ve yet to storm the gates of mobile. With mobile versions of all their hits in the offing, KIXEYE is poised for a mind-boggling 2013. If they can duplicate their successes on iOS and Android, then all that bluster and bravado found on the video will not only be vindicated, it will become legend.
“We’ve been patiently waiting for the right time to make our move into mobile,” Scott says. “When other game companies were abandoning their online strategy, we were doubling down. Now we’re ready to dominate mobile by leveraging our browser success, and have the right internal resources in place.”
KIXEYE has three mobile titles coming out shortly based on existing IP, including Backyard Monsters: Unleashed and War Commander: Rogue Assault. KIXEYE will release mobile versions of all future games at or shortly after their browser debuts moving forward. They’ve also got a Massive Online Battle Arena called TOME: Immortal Arena on deck that sounds very promising.
At the end of the KIXEYE video (which Scott claims has increased recruitment 1,000%), CEO Will Harbin says “40 years from now, when you’re bouncing your grandkids on your knee and they ask ‘Grandpa, what kinds of games did you used to make?’, you can say ‘Little ones, I made games that kicked serious ass’…[and] they’ll understand that you worked for KIXEYE, that you redefined online gaming, imitated no one, compromised nothing and had a fucking blast doing it.” Then he dons a unicorn mask and climbs a rope ladder dropped from the sky, ostensibly from a hovering helicopter above.
Who wouldn’t want to work for a company like this?
Comments
