The casual games market isn’t going anywhere else than towards growth, says 24/7 Games’ CEO John Battagline, who created their studio from scratch, on their own, with no money, years ago. They released themed versions of games like sudoku, poker and blackjack: this made sense because of a well-established audience, but not intellectual properties in the traditional sense, that those games have. Now, they’re reapplying the lessons learned, with the new label, Burger Circus. “If you re-skin, re-purpose and recycle, you will rapidly create a lot of products, and every single one of them will allow you to gradually accumulate an audience. Hopefully you are going to hit a slam dunk and get a ton of users. The idea is that this will have an upward spiral effect”, John explained in their Casual Connect USA session, sharing the experience of crafting their game, RogueMON, on a don’t-quit-your-day-job budget.
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John Battagline is the CEO of 24/7 Games, but it wasn’t always that way. Roughly a decade ago, they were working in a typical corporate job, and describe their mood at the time as “trapped and bored, in a carpeted gray cage with very little to do.” However, John worked at night on some games that might be fun for some of their coworkers.
When several colleagues played these online games, John realized there was potentially a huge audience for these sorts of entertainment. It was soon after that when they decided to leave their job working for a large company to dedicate themselves to making games full time.
John Battagline and the Hedgehog
Early on, John created multiple board games with friends and “drew 1,000 variously-themed Sonic the Hedgehogs”, showing they were on the path to designing video games. John was also helped in no small part by their brother, who taught them computer programming when they were about 10 and showed that if there’s enough motivation, you can quit a stable job to do the thing you really love. John took this experience and created a unique entrepreneurial position while they were still in high school.
“When I was 16, I ran my first small business selling internet currency in an online MMO on eBay,” John detailed. “I learned to program so I could automate this process - even while I was away at my day job, working at a pizza shop. Coming home from work - where I toiled away in 110 degree heat next to a convection oven in the summertime - every afternoon to see that my program had made ‘passive income’ gave me a different perspective on what a gratifying career could feel like.”
“Like most college students, I anticipated my first job after graduation to feel like the pinnacle of my life’s work - and I’d live happily ever after,” they added. “Unfortunately, to me, it felt like a pizza shop. And it wasn’t much longer that I started to re-apply my interests into starting another passive income business. I guess you could say that working at ungratifying jobs is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
4th of July Spades and Christmas Sudoku
24/7 Games has managed to put out some popular card game apps for web and mobile, yet the company is only three people large, including John. They think this is an advantage, allowing them to be very agile.
“We’re the tiny boat chasing after the big whale with nothing but three people,” they said. “As it turns out, if everyone does their job well, you really don’t need a big development team. And, because we don’t have a lot of overhead, even cutting into a tiny portion of the competition’s revenue can yield big financial results for us.”
Perennial card and puzzle games like blackjack, poker and sudoku are the main focus at 24/7 Games. They put out many different “themed” versions as well, based upon holidays and seasons, which John says keeps players engaged and helps increase the chance that an app gets noticed on various app stores.
“’Ubiquitous games’ have a well-established audience, but are not intellectual properties, in the traditional sense (meaning they can always be ‘cloned’ or ‘rebooted’),” John said. “In reality, they behave more like tool apps that people regularly use to alleviate boredom. Because SEO can take months (or sometimes years), its important to develop products around sustainable keywords. The variations are there to both increase the number of keywords you can acquire, and to generate additional hype by cross-promoting your products with another.”
Many of their games are played for money in casinos, and John confirmed they would certainly look into having real-world money options if the law changed in the U.S. “We have several card games (such as poker) that would readily adapt for this business model,” they noted.
Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls
In working to create the next hit, John notes that it’s hard work to constantly iterate until you get something right. It’s worth it though when they know someone who loves their game, noting that their grandmother plays roughly an hour of the Solitaire/Mahjong game every day.
When searching for that next hit game, John notes that not everything will do as well as you’d hope. “On my 29th birthday, Flappy Bird was taken off the iOS market and - like so many others - I decided to drop all responsibilities and create a clone in an attempt to be ‘first to market’ on the store,” they said. “Needless to say…that’s one birthday I’ll never get back! But, at least I learned a valuable lesson: stick with what you know, and don’t go chasing waterfalls.”
Not everything has been a huge hit, but John is proud of the fact that they were asked to speak at Casual Connect USA 2016. “It’s also INCREDIBLY validating whenever one of our products gets curated to the top of a store. Imagine, one day, opening up your Google Play Developer console to see an app go from 1k-100k installs in the span of just a few hours! This happened to us for Summer Mahjong, and similar things have happened for several other games: 24/7 Mahjong, Summer Sudoku, etc.,” they noted. “I guess, you constantly tell yourself that you don’t care what other people think, and that you’ll just do the best job you can…but, let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a li’l praise and affection?”
Attitude Over Experience
John is very open about how lucky they feel they are to work with such creative and motivated people. They get to improve their processes with every game and face new challenges every day, and they’re thankful for that.
When it comes to team members, John believes that mentality is more important than experience. “I’m a HUGE proponent of attitude over skill set: I believe you can teach a dog to program if its sufficiently motivated, but that some people you can’t even motivate enough to bark,” they said, adding: “I think its super important to work with different types of people to bring their perspective into the fold.”
When looking into the future what John sees (other than a hope and a dream that they will one day make RogueMON 2) they see the potential in VR… if some of the current issues get addressed.
“If they can figure out how to make it so you don’t become seasick and bored, I guess VR,” John said, adding. “I think that the market for casual games is going to continue to grow. They’re so incredibly lucrative and don’t take a lot to create. We’re currently trying to expand more into this space as time goes on by both taking over more keywords, and trying out alternative methods of income.”
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