Ben Ward – Supergonk Founder

Our first guest lecture was held by Ben Ward, founder and sole member of Supergonk – a studio that focuses on mobile game development. In his lecture, he spoke about his journey through the games industry and how to build an independent games (indie) studio of our own (through his own experience).

This report will cover his point about platform choice and the problem of piracy with said choice.

Platforms and Piracy

As a business owner, Ben creates his games in the hopes of making money. First and foremost games are an extension of the creator, to provide entertainment to the players, and so his motivation for money making is for him to build up his studio and bring more developers in to create better games.

This is why platform choice is important. Looking at Ben’s latest blog post (Ward, 2015), you can see how choosing the platform will affect the number of people that play your game. From 237 of Ben’s own releases spread out across 7 platforms, there has been over 5.5 million downloads. This is an incredible amount for "basically" one person creating these games.

In the lecture, he talked about the platforms he would suggest an indie studio should target and gave some information why. For desktop, Steam and OS app stores were viable but other portals (i.e. Big Fish) were easier to access for a new studio. Mobile also had one main focus too, with Ben mentioning that iOS was the best option, in his experience.

But targeting more platforms means more money, right? Well, not necessarily.

The talk moved onto one of Supergonk's latest releases, Safe Cracker, and it's story on Android. Analytics soon after release told Ben that his game had over 500,000 plays on the Android alone, but had only sold 155 units. Using the sales numbers, each customer would have to play the game just over 3200 times in such a short amount of time. It's a possibility, but a very unlikely one.

The other possibility, which is a lot more likely, is piracy, which is very popular today.

I was intrigued by Ben's experience on this, I had always thought of iOS as the better choice but piracy never crossed my mind. So I decided to look into this a little more and came across an article featuring the very popular 'Monument Valley' mobile game.

The article (Johnson, 2015) interviews Dan Gray, producer of the game, and discusses a Twitter post (see article) from the developer. According to the numbers available to them, only 5% of installations of the game on Android and 40% on iOS were paid for. Gray went on to say that even though "free days" were taken out of the figures, people may have more than one device to install it on, so one purchase would cover that. The article then continues on about marketing and issues about pricing.

This was a shock for me as even iOS had 60% of sales being unpaid for in that instance, with a high probability that a lot of it was due to piracy.

In conclusion, while desktop piracy is something that has been talked about quite a lot, mobile piracy, while not news, has a lot less press. The mobile industry is at a point where they have to prepare beforehand for lower sales due to piracy. This exact reason could be why free-to-play or "freemium" is such a popular avenue for developers.

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References:

Ward, Ben. (2015) Supergonk Statistics Blog Post [Online]. Available from: <http://benjamesward.tumblr.com/post/107511447150/supergonk-statistics-blog-post> [Accessed 06 February 2015].

Johnson, Eric. (2015) Mobile Game Piracy Isn't All Bad [Online]. Available from: <http://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad-says-monument-valley-producer-qa/> [Accessed 08 February 2015].