Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Gamzee Shifts Staff, Looks Towards Smaller Games
Los Angeles-based Gamzee, the HTML5 game development firm headed by Howard Marks, one of the founders of Activision, has shifted its staff as it rethinks how to approach the market. The startup develops the Skyscraper City social game, which lets users create and build a city, adding buildings, redeveloping neighborhoods, and more. According to Marks, the firm has decided to rethink the opportunity, and now sees that it's important to create smaller, rather than bigger games, due to the time it takes to load games on mobile platforms. As a result, the firm has laid off three programmers at the firm, in order to spend more of its resources on marketing. Marks explained that it found the cost of acquisition of players is very expensive, and smaller, faster-loading games gain much faster, viral growth than bigger games. Marks said that Skyscraper City is showing major growth, and has been one of the fastest growing games in the last month. The firm's title has gone from 270,000 unique users active users at the beginning of the year to over 500,000 last week. Marks said the company has discovered that in order to keep users using a game on mobile, you have to keep the load time to between five and ten seconds, something you can't do if your game becomes too complex.