New Zealand based Rocket Jump has developed popular mobile games like Major Mayhem and has recently released another hit with Mini Golf Matchup. The Wellington firm partnered with American mobile gaming platform Scopely to launch the app that has gotten 10 million downloads by the end of its first month. More surprisingly the game was so hot that it took only 8 hours to reach the number one spot for the App Store of 28 countries.
Rocket Jump’s managing director, Antony Blackett, felt that the company’s location in New Zealand put them at a disadvantage because they could not interact with other developers easily. The partnership with Scopely helped resolve that issue and Blackett states that, “When your head is down and you are building a product, you don’t really have the time to build the relationship you need to talk with Apple and constantly show them what you are building. When you are in New Zealand, you don’t get that opportunity.”
Scopely CEO Walter Driver states that his firm was, “born out of the recognition that there is a lot of amazing content created out there that can make lots of amazing user experiences, but conditions in mobile gaming make it hard for independent developers to compete at a higher level in terms of distribution, monetization and service side infrastructure.” Driver and and co-founder Eytan Elbaz got Scopely going in 2011 with $8.5 million seed funding thanks to Anthem Venture Partners.
Rocket Jump showed up on Driver’s radar when they released Major Mayhem with the help of Adult Swim. The hit game lead to the two companies starting to work in February 2013. Scopely contributed to the effort by helping “develop the Mini Golf Matchup’s multiplayer experience and monetization model. The company also marketed the game by leveraging its user base.”
Driver says that, “Discoverability is a huge challenge. You can make one of the best games that people have ever seen and if you haven’t exposed it to enough people at launch, then it won’t have a life. Our advantage is having a large user base to market to and launching stuff on a consistent basis. Independent game studios might launch a couple titles a year, but we know the partners that are most effective at paid user acquisition.”
Thanks to Scopely the Mini Golf Matchup gave the game one million downloads on the very first day. After that the company devised other methods to help the user base grow and achieve further success along with advertisers.
Driver says, “We feel like we can’t provide the kind of value we want to provide for 100 partners and we don’t want to. There are quite a few publishers out there that make a volume play of as many things as they can and hope something becomes a huge phenomenon. We don’t feel that provides the best service for our partners and it’s not the most likely way to make Scopely successful.”
Blackett says that, “Scopely has been very hands-on. On the development of the parts, it feels like they are a lot more committed to it than other publishers are. It felt more like a co-development than a publisher-developer deal.”
Source: TechCrunch
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