Serenastyle Blog

Through a few mutual friends, I knew Charles Ju was developing iPhone games—I just didn’t know which ones until he tweeted his most recent social game, iMafia. It seemed to be getting pretty good results in no time, so I decided to interview him online. I asked him to tell me a little bit about his company first.

PlayMesh, the parent company of iggyGames, made its debut with the release of Chess Puzzles, a top 25 application with over 200,000 downloads. The company vision is to bring the power of social gaming to the casual iPhone game developer. We're located in Mountain View, CA. We have 2 full time developers and 2 part-time developers. The full-time developers are split to be in charge of server-side coding and the other for client side coding. The two part-time developers pitch in 20-30 hours a week, patching up holes as we need them, focusing mainly on server-side coding. We think that we are unique because there are almost no gaming companies on the iPhone right now trying to leverage the inherent social graph of the iPhone in their games. We think that games are exponentially more fun when they are played with friends. And it makes sense, traditionally the mobile gaming industry has focused on producing quality games with short life spans. Companies opt for a several iterations and releases of the same game as opposed to dedicating to one specific game and growing it out. The iPhone is the first mobile gaming platform with internet connectivity and the critical mass to make it worthwhile to invest time and effort into making long-lasting, high-value games, and that's why we're moving in this direction. You can read more about our company and business model on Venture Beat.

I’ve always wondered why developers limit themselves to very specific markets. I mean, why just iPhone game applications? I asked Charles what benefits he saw in developing for such a small niche.

iPhone games are a revolution. This is the first time in the history of gaming where players can download content on the fly and play with their friends from anywhere. This is the first time that a mobile phone operating system has opened up for anyone to develop on with a path to monetize. If you make the #1 paid application spot on the paid store, you'll instantly make $100,000 that week. This is not a small niche, this is the beginning of a billion dollar market.

Did you guys hear that? I think I’ll just bold that last sentence for the skim-readers. Before iMafia, there were more. I mean, everyone starts small, right? Well, I’m not sure if I would call Chess Puzzles a "small" game. I vaguely recall seeing it on Top 25.

We knew that in order to execute on our plan to create a virtual goods platform we needed to create a couple of "normal" isolated games ourselves to figure out how those games work, and use those as tests within our social framework. So with that in mind we have actually gathered almost 200,000 downloads from a combination of our different games that we have released in the last few months (iType, Speed Shapes, and Chess Puzzles). But now that we have finally finished our social framework, we're going to use this to first build out and scale to perfection iMafia before deciding on the best course of action to take next.

Of course I had to ask, why free?

Free apps have huge amounts of value. We're modeling ourselves off of games in Asia and on Facebook and MySpace, with 2 examples in particular: The first is mobile gaming in Japan, which is a completely different market than that on the iPhone. Everyone in Japan plays games built with flash because they have a huge symbian (Nokia) foundation, we do not have that in the United States. In Japan, one of the biggest mobile companies is a mobile gaming social network, Mobage-Town, they made $46 M in Q1 last year. (article) The second is what has been happening on Facebook with gaming companies like Zynga. By leveraging existing social networks they were able to produce very simple games that were incredibly addicting. They are rumored to have pulled in $30-50 M last year. (article)

Case made. Apple had only hoped for 10 million iPhone users—but there are now over 13 million. I had to know what he saw for the future of mobile applications and if he planned on expanding to other software development in the near future.

Mobile applications is the true "disruptive" advancement in technology that is going to lead the next 10 years. Imagine the possibilities of everyone having an iPhone on them at all times. People can connect with one another on totally different levels. This will allow us to all be more social and keep in touch with our friends and family. To me, that is incredibly exciting. As for the near future, the ability for developers to instantly have a user base, to monetize good software, and to have exponential levels of user engagement will drive incredible amounts of innovation into the mobile space. We have only scratched the surface of this revolution, as more and more iPhone clones come out we will start to realize the true potential of mobile phones. According to Juniper Research, by 2013 there are going to be 730 M people using mobile social networks (source). This used to seem far-fetched less than a year ago, now that seems like it might be an understatement. And yes, we do plan to expand our development in the future as a gaming studio, as a developer platform, and across mobile operating systems. There is no reason to lock ourselves in a cage when everything is up for grabs. This is the new world!

I’m a gaming n00b. Heck, a few friends told me I couldn’t be a true geek because I didn’t know the names of their Street Fighter characters. "Immersive massive multiplayer online role playing game"? Please explain.

iMafia is an immersive massive multiplayer experience because you fight and punch real people, who will react with real emotions. As we grow this out we will implement a lot more communication features that will allow users to interact with one another and really bring out that competitive spirit.

And how exactly do these "quests" work?

Right now the quests are mafia-themed and done with the simple click of a button. This was done because we realized that gamers love gameplay more than fancy graphics or tedious grinding actions. The interesting part of iMafia is not the flashy fast-action graphics but rather a comprehensive streamlined interface to play a game that requires strategy and facilitates a true multiplayer experience. The weapons, armors, and vehicles are all based on real items and we tried to be as real-world-accurate as we could.

I mean, I assume my goal is to be a "top mafia" on the global leaderboard...and I suppose I get there by a combination of killing off the most ppl, getting the most bounty, and owning the most real estate?

Yes. We like to award our most dedicated players with vanity trophies.

Trophies, score! Lastly, gamers play…but has anyone ever thought about how much stress/excitement the guys behind the scenes are experiencing within the first week?!

It is INSANE. We had an explosive amount of users on the first day before anything came out on the press and we have been growing exponentially ever since. We had a hard time scaling our servers, but we pulled out all the stops and drank lots of red bull to go from total noob to a semi-proficient system administrator. It was the biggest and most incentivized learning experience of my life, and while there is still a lot to do, I'm extremely proud of my team and thanksful to those that have supported us through our first couple of days So yes, we are extremely happy.

And we’re happy for getting new games! Time to go be a mafia.