We saw a similar trend in the shooter market, recognizing there was another opportunity there we could take advantage of. Our first hit series was the Big Win Sports franchise we created.Īrguably, we were a leader in sports on mobile for quite a while. But we saw the emergence of free-to-play, and we were early movers with free-to-play in mobile. Ian set the strategy to fail quickly, and we certainly did. We started with some inexpensive paid games to learn a bit. We transitioned fully during the 2011 year. Be in charge of our own destiny with both business and creativity. We knew that was where we could be what we wanted to be - be that publisher and create the original IP we wanted. We made our plans to burn all our bridges and focus everything on mobile. And then we saw the opportunity to transition in late 2010. We were neck-deep in our downloadable titles at the time, but we kept our eyes on it.
Vlad Ceraldi, Hothead director of development: It looked like a gold rush.
GamesBeat: Tell me about the transition from console to mobile. In the following years, Hothead deliberately charged into this new space with the idea of applying its development know how in an all-digital ecosystem, and I caught up with the team to chat with them about that history and how it ended up where it is today.Ĭheck out my interview with Hothead’s executives about their history right here: Everyone at Hothead noticed it was happening, and they were keeping an eye on it while working on their digital console releases. Then, in 2009, mobile gaming started taking off. We knew that things would eventually go pure digital and downloadable, but it wasn’t happening fast enough.” And the market didn’t develop the way we expected. The approval process for our original ideas wasn’t exactly what we had hoped for. They wouldn’t let us directly publish, only as a third party. “In some cases, we couldn’t even get a publisher license on a couple of platforms. “It got harder and harder to deliver content to these channels because they were more closed than we anticipated,” said Ceraldi. But working as an indie developer in the days of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 was a lot more challenging than it is today. The company worked on the Penny Arcade game On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One and Deathspank with beloved adventure game director Ron Gilbert. That’s when we founded the company to be that publisher of independent original titles.” “We thought that opportunity would exist in downloadable PC and console. “We saw an opportunity in the market to become a new kind of publisher - direct to consumer, based on new IP,” Ceraldi told GamesBeat.
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