Sebastien Borget is the COO and Co-Founder of Pixowl. They manage the operations of the studio and supervise the production and marketing of all the company’s titles. This includes the popular creation game The Sandbox, its sequel The Sandbox Evolution and also Peanuts: Snoopy’s Town Tale and Garfield: Survival of the Fattest.
“The Sandbox entertains almost like a love story with its community and many times in the past we have been involving the community into deciding what would be the next update or what ideas they wanted in the game,” they said.
Making a Mark on Mobile
Sebastien got started with Pixowl when they found other indie developers that shared their vision. They then assembled a team and started producing their own games for mobile platforms.
“My previous entrepreneurship experiences, as well as working on large scale customer projects from head start to final delivery, has contributed to reach a higher level of efficiency,” they noted. “You’re never protected against making rookie mistakes when you’re new in an industry, but my past career experiences have acted as a fast path for catching up on the bullet train!”
When Apple and Google introduced their iOS and Android mobile operating systems, Sebastien says it offered so many more opportunities for making video games. No longer was game development limited to large teams with huge budgets, indies were again able to enter the market.
“From this moment on, I wanted to make a game that would create a community of players and involve them into creating with us,” Sebastien said. “Our vision with The Sandbox and now The Sandbox Evolution has always been to become a leading mobile gaming creative platform where, #Players are the #Makers, sharing pixel worlds, pixel art, game levels, music & much more!”
Stronger from Adversity
While there are opportunities on the App Store and Google Play, the mobile gaming industry is very competitive now. Sebastien says it’s not just about making a good game – now there’s data analysis to discovery your audience, a smart marketing strategy to target the right consumers, making the game compelling enough to play for weeks and (finally) ensuring that the revenue the game brings in is enough to keep a company running.
“Luck can be part of the game, but it only works if all the above ingredients are also present,” said Sebastien. “We had previous projects which didn’t match all the check boxes from above and, over time were not worth continuing from a business perspective. It was difficult to explain both to players and our team why the game could not be continued.”
“There’s always ups and downs in the life of a company, especially a startup. You grow stronger from adversity!” they added. “We’re still there after 5 years and focusing on our greatest success so far: The Sandbox. Our studio has acquired a lot of experience into developing a great mobile freemium experience for our players. I think the key here is to really keep working and optimizing your top product!”
Players are Makers
As evidenced by the number of times they brought it up, Sebastien is very proud of The Sandbox. Created in less than half a year, they saw people creating pixel art and electricity simulators after launch. This was something no one at Pixowl anticipated.
“The community actually hacked the game to create their own creative worlds. As we embraced this reaction, we also saw The Sandbox community (Facebook & YouTube) grow really fast,” said Sebastien. “I’m proud to say that we have been empowering players with the tools to let them craft amazing contents! And that the recent launch of The Sandbox Evolution, the sequel of The Sandbox, is a large success and didn’t deceive our players!”
Sebastien notes that Minecraft really changed the industry, allowing players to create and explore possibilities like never before. Using that as a model, there will be more games that put emphasis on making the players be makers and on user-generated content.
“The Sandbox is a complementary platform - we value players as the makers and offer the community a 2D touch system that enables the creation of worlds pixel by pixel. With The Sandbox Evolution, we move beyond the creation of worlds and offer players the ability to create and share complex platformer levels and challenge their friends,” they detailed. “We are building a ‘Bigger, Better Version of The Sandbox’, sharing the same vision with all our Pixowl team members to be the #1 mobile gaming creative platform where #Players are #Makers, sharing pixel worlds, pixel art, game levels, music and much more!”
Communication and Empowerment
Pixowl has operated using free-to-play since it began. Sebastien says that their “freemium” model allows them to add features depending on what their customers want, whether they want to pay hundreds of dollars (US) or just 99 cents. “What is wonderful is that both kinds of players can enjoy the game, and make beautiful creations,” they note.
Along those lines, Sebastien points out that it’s hard to find game producers who work with freemium games. “We’re looking for people who have the capacity to envision a full game in all its aspects (creative, UI/UX, game design, art direction) as well as being able to run the live ops of this game and think [on their feet].” Sebastien said, noting that more generally, “We’re looking for people who will make the team stronger as a whole; and can easily really become a part of it — no matter how talented they are individually. Strong experience is really also what we value the most over just courses in a curriculum.”
As for what Sebastien thinks employees think of them, they postulated, “They do think I’m a hard worker, super-implicated, pro-active and always looking for excellency. They most probably say I’m really (too much?) committed to what I’m doing and passionate about it, ha ha!”
When complications come up, Sebastien had a general one word solution: communication. “Good communication is as important as what needs to be changed,” they said. “Also, we are taking steps to empowering people in taking decisions on their own.”
Refine, Polish and Improve
When it comes to play testing, Pixowl will get hands-on time with people outside of the team as soon as the game is in a playable state. They use that to gather metrics from thousands of players for months as part of a beta/soft launch.
“We are making the game for a very specific audience and it is key for us to make sure we are not missing any details on understanding how they play and why,” Sebastien said. “Going one step further, we’ve also been running somewhere close to 50 play tests. We’ve got literally hours of video recordings of players going through the game, from tutorial to campaigns and gameplay!”
“This has been a very interesting process for us to help understand better what was going on in a player’s mind and refine, polish and improve the game accordingly,” they added. “We’ve had very positive reactions of course, but also we acquired a lot of knowledge on what was not obvious to players and could make them fail and quit the game.”
Applying Gaming Best Practices to Other Fields
Video games, especially mobile games, rely heavily on analytics to become better. This use of data could be applied to other fields, and there’s a lot of potential for the future of data analysis.
“I think the gaming industry is one step ahead in how user-data analysis can help shape better products and services compared to other industries in general,” they said, “If we were to apply the same level of polishing, analysis and process to broader topics, a very recent case is how MachineZone applied their technology to help improve city buses traffic.”
“This opens a whole range of opportunities don’t you think?” Sebastien noted. “Now I’m in gaming, tomorrow I could apply gaming best practices to other fields!”
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