Risky Business: Surviving The Mobile Middle Ground

Mobile gaming is an undeniable and growing force in our industry, with wildly popular titles like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Temple Run turning small teams into massive success stories overnight. With the largest potential customer base and profit margins in gaming history, it’s easy to see why developing for mobile is an alluring concept. From the husband and wife team that made Temple Run to former triple-A console game designers like Peter Molyneux and David Jaffe, fewer and fewer developers are finding themselves immune to its appeal. 

One of those stories belongs to Matt Cox, the lead designer on the original Scribblenauts who left developer 5th Cell and pursued the dream of mobile success. We’ve all heard the stories of overnight successes that made millions despite humble beginnings, but Cox’s story is the far more common result that’s rarely discussed. Despite his solid resume, over $5,000 of his own money, and relatively decent press coverage, Cox and his small team learned how elusive mobile success can be.

Forks in the Road

Like many in the industry, Cox was experimenting with game design long before he was ever paid for it. His paycheck came from an unrewarding day job at a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, but his free time was spent writing game reviews and preparing for a career in development. “I was really bored working for [the newspaper],” Cox says. “I realized I didn’t want to write for a living. I’d rather create video games.”

Without an education in game design, Cox joined up with an enthusiastic online community of Halo fans to try his hand at creating custom levels. “I was still a little kid dreaming of that one day I’m going to make my own games,” Cox says. “I thought I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into the industry because I was a nobody. I didn’t know anyone in the industry, and it’s really hard to get a design job.”

Despite his lack of connections, his growing portfolio of custom Halo levels was becoming more and more impressive over time. Eventually, his body of work made him confident enough to apply for positions with a variety of developers. In 2006, THQ offered him his first paid position in the gaming industry. By Cox’s own admission, designing levels for the poorly received Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon wasn’t exactly a triple-A development job, but it was a foot in the door. Moving out of his home state of Kansas for the first time, Cox relocated to Seattle and began his new career.

Two years after the move, it was time to take the next step. During his time in Seattle, he befriended Jeremiah Slaczka, creative director of developer 5th Cell. Cox’s resume wasn’t extensive at this point, but Slaczka felt that his attitude fit the studio’s culture. Scribblenauts was in the early phases of design, and 5th Cell was willing to take the risk of bringing a relatively inexperienced level designer into a lead role. “When I heard the concept of Scribblenauts, I was like ‘I want to be a part of this,’” Cox says. “I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I want to be a part of it if it does.”

It worked. Scribblenauts caught the attention of the gaming press at E3 in 2009, and positive buzz continued to grow until the unique DS title’s release later that year. Cox had gone from being a level designer on an unsuccessful release to the lead designer of one of the year’s most talked-about titles.

In his position, most designers would relish their newfound success and look forward to even brighter days in the industry. Instead, Cox left the industry and moved back to Kansas. “It makes me sound absolutely psychotic,” Cox says. “People will probably joke that I had a ‘religious experience,’ which is almost the truth.”

After arriving in Seattle in 2006, Cox had become deeply involved with a church known as EastLake. He had always been a Christian, but disliked the stuffiness and intolerant views of churches he had experienced while growing up in Kansas. “[EastLake] was one of those churches that we always wanted in Lawrence growing up, but that kind of atmosphere just wasn’t around there.”

One of EastLake’s pastors left Seattle to start a branch of the church in Wisconsin, and his move inspired Cox to do the same. “[My wife and I] made a decision to be crazy and basically leave paradise,” Cox says. “There was nothing bad about our lives in Seattle. In fact, it was our dream. We loved everything about it, but we felt so strongly that this was something Lawrence needed and we decided to walk away from it.”

His mind was made up, and his family prepared for the move back home. During the process of relocating, his story received one more ironic twist. “On my way out of Seattle, I get a call from Frank O’Connor [franchise development director of Halo],” Cox says. “He offered me a design position on Halo 4 and I had to turn it down. It was such a weird, awful moment. I believed in what I was doing with moving back to Lawrence, but at the same time, that dream I had of working on Halo was being offered to me while I was exiting the industry.”

Back in the Game

Declining his former dream position, he went through with the move in 2009. For two years, Cox’s focus was solely set on getting his new church off the ground. Even with the passion he felt for his new project, he never discounted the possibility of getting back into game development in some form. “It was always in the back of my mind,” Cox says. “If I ever met somebody or if I ever had the resources or the time, I would probably try making some small game. I didn’t know if it was going to be DS or mobile, but I knew I might try it someday.”

“I had five to ten core gameplay ideas that I hadn’t seen before,” Cox says. “While I was working in the industry, I thought ‘Oh, these might be interesting to try someday.’” One concept for a potential DS game stuck with him after he left the industry. “It was just rocks and sticks, and you guide this rock around with the stylus and bash through stuff to collect a chain behind you.”

Rocks and sticks may have formed the original, bare bones DS concept, but Cox switched his focus to mobile and decided to tailor the art style towards the growing mobile market. “All of these successful mobile titles like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope have a really cute, plushy, and adorable character that’s round. I even thought about the syllables. An-gry-birds. Cut-the-rope. I was really fixated on the marketing. I thought that bees can be really cute, and I didn’t see a lot of bees around. What do bees do? They all stick together. Okay fine, I’m doing Sticky Bees.”

Players would use their finger to control an invincible king bee, who could be bashed through enemy waves of insects for points. Combos could be built by collecting “sticky bees,” which followed the king around like a game of Snake. It was up to the player to protect his chain of bees, who (unlike the king) could be killed by the insect enemies. Sticky Bees was a simple concept that wouldn’t require huge feats of programming, but more complex development potentially could have been difficult as Kansas isn’t exactly a hotbed of game developers to recruit help from.

As luck would have it, Cox didn’t have to look beyond his church to find a team. Michael Rowland was a member who put together an informative app for EastLake, but had never worked on a game before. “He taught himself how to code,” Cox says. “He wasn’t going to charge us, he just said ‘If you want a church app, here it is.’ At that moment, I wondered if he’d be up for the challenge of learning how to do a very simple game concept.”

Rowland was in, and so was Brock Brown, another EastLake member who had worked on the app. It didn’t take much convincing to get the church’s music director, Palmer Davidson on board, either. It was an intriguing proposal for the group. Everyone would be able to remain active in the church, and that dream of “small team releases mobile success” excited them. Cox was the only one in the group to have ever worked on a game before, but the entire team was up for the challenge. They formed an LLC with equal ownership, named it FourFire, and work on Sticky Bees officially began.

For eight months, the four members of FourFire spent whatever free time they could scrape together in Cox’s basement or at a local coffee shop working on the game. “We all agreed that any time that’s not with our family or work, we’re going to set that time aside to make this happen,” Cox says. Sitting together with laptops and smartphones, the four tested prototypes and put together the general design of the game. Cox did level design from his Macbook, Davidson put together the soundtrack on his keyboard, and Rowland would keep their phones updated with the latest build of the game. For the art, FourFire relied on Brian McDonaugh, a contractor based in Georgia.

From Cox’s perspective, it was a welcome change of pace from the big budget publisher/developer structure. “[With mobile], you bypass the publisher completely,” Cox says. “You don’t have to worry about distribution, boxing, manufacturing...any of that stuff. That’s why it’s so popular. Especially if you’re going from a big studio that makes one to two bucks on each copy of their game to making 70 percent of whatever you’re charging, it’s a pretty big jump.”

Even the smallest mobile games require a financial investment, and Cox put up over $5,000 of his own cash to fund Sticky Bees’ development. “I’m the only one that put in an actual dollar amount,” he said. “I had some money in savings, and I believed in the game.” None of the members of FourFire were technically employees, but the team had reached a payout agreement in case the game was a success. 

Exactly how Sticky Bees was going to make its money back was a frequent point of discussion for FourFire. Davidson pushed for the game to be free to play, but supported with in-app purchases. Cox wanted to charge an upfront amount. “A lot of the highest grossing games are free to play,” Cox says. “But they just milk that economy and make it addicting in some way, shape, or form.”

Serious discussions about monetization didn’t happen until late in the development process (“which was stupid,” according to Cox). FourFire decided to launch the game at 99 cents, which would be followed by a free version if it didn’t take off. In-app purchases also found their way into the game, in the form of power-ups and another key incentive that the team was banking on. If a player died, they could purchase a “super continue” for a dollar. With it, the screen would be cleared of enemies and five bees would be added to the king bee’s chain.

“This is really stupid, but we were banking on the super continue to be our biggest moneymaker,” Cox says. “We wanted to hook that hardcore crowd into getting the highest score on the leaderboard. That way, they didn’t have to start over if they screwed up once. It really wasn’t well thought out, honestly. Money-wise, we should have thought that through way better. I should have educated myself a lot more on what to do there.”

The Final Push

As the beginning of 2012 approached, the team was preparing for the game’s February 2nd release. FourFire released a ten-minute “Behind the Bees” clip on YouTube, showcasing the four friends discussing Sticky Bees with obvious excitement. Twitter and Facebook accounts for the game were created, offering new screens and art in exchange for “likes.” FourFire launched their own website, with the header image claiming that the team was “Developing the next big handheld addiction at the speed of awesome.” It was clear that the team had begun to dream big as the release date neared.

“We felt that it had the potential to catch fire if the initial month was big,” Cox says. “I don’t think we were ready to buy yachts and retire, but it’s really hard not to dream. It’s like people who buy lottery tickets. Nobody in their rational mind thinks they’re going to win the lottery, but for that Wednesday or that Saturday that you buy the Powerball ticket, you dream a little bit. And it’s fun.”

Thanks to Cox’s previous work on Scribblenauts, several large gaming sites reported on the upcoming release. Local newspapers ran stories about the game designer who left the big budget gaming industry to start a church and subsequently form a modest development team with the church’s own members. Considering most of the team had never made a game before, FourFire’s excitement at the time is easy to understand. The project that they had poured so many hours and months into was being seen on national websites and in newspapers. On paper, there was no reason that Sticky Bees couldn’t be the next big mobile success.

The Big Day Arrives

After spending over eight months developing the game, the four members of FourFire woke up on February 2nd, 2012 and prepared to see the results of their work. “It was this nervous, nervous excitement,” Cox says. “You don’t really find out until the end of the day what your sales were, so we were just sitting around waiting to find out how many sold.”

They’d have to wait until day’s end for sales numbers, but reactions from gamers and press trickled in throughout the day. “Some people had reviews in the 7s and 8s,” Cox says. “There were a couple 6s and whatever, but I was like, ‘Guys, you need to be proud of this. You’ve never done this before.’ I was trying to encourage them as much as possible that regardless of what the sales are at the end of the day, you guys should be really proud that you’ve never done anything and it’s getting at least this sort of reception.”

At the end of the day, the team finally received the official sales tally. “At first we were like ‘Holy crap, we did like 400 today!’ So then we’re like ‘Okay, it’s going to snowball and snowball,’” Cox says. “It was a great feeling. The whole first week was a really cool celebration atmosphere.” For that initial week of release, Sticky Bees was featured on the iOS App Store’s New & Noteworthy section. On each of these days, the game was downloaded hundreds of times.

Immediately after falling off of the New & Noteworthy section, things took a dramatic turn. “The week following release, we saw our sales die,” Cox says. “They just died. At the end of that second week, I looked at the weekly report and was like ‘Oof...this did not exactly catch fire.’ It was kind of a gut punch but I still tried to encourage everyone, saying ‘Guys, regardless...you should be proud.’ But I’d be lying if I told you that there wasn’t this disappointment in the back of my head.”

Reality Sets In

After the first week, the dream of Sticky Bees becoming a mobile success story quickly fell apart. It went from selling hundreds every day to selling less than ten a week almost immediately. Free monthly updates for the game were originally planned, which would dress up the king bee to look like a leprechaun, Easter bunny, turkey, or Santa Claus depending on the time of year. One document that Cox provided us details new levels, enemies, gameplay tweaks, projectiles, and abilities. As interest in the game took a nosedive, the team decided to scrap all of its future update plans.

During the game’s release month, the Sticky Bees Twitter and Facebook accounts attempted a social media blitz. Tweets were directed at local news stations, actors from Firefly, Ashton Kutcher, the Kansas City Chiefs, and more. Outside of a quick mention from a former KU basketball player, none responded. Looking at the @StickyBeesGame timeline, it’s clear to see when the team’s enthusiasm began to fade. In the span of approximately a month surrounding release, the account tweeted 75 times. From February 14th to August 1st, 2012, the account produced zero updates.

That August 1st update announced Cox’s original backup plan in case the game didn’t take off. A free version would be introduced to the App Store, offering two stages at no cost. “We didn’t care,” Cox says. “We just put it out there and let our Facebook friends know ‘Hey, download this for free if you don’t want to pony up the dollar and buy it.’” While it put up approximately the same amount of download numbers as the paid version (see sidebar), the team made virtually no money off of it.

With no money coming in for the game, it was clear that the rest of the team at FourFire wouldn’t be buying yachts or retiring off of Sticky Bees profits. “The idea was, there would be percentages going to everybody once I made my money back,” Cox says. “But it never made any money back, so that never even came to fruition.”

Cox didn’t make his money back on his investment, but he doesn’t harbor any regrets about the experience of creating Sticky Bees. “When I say I lost $3,000 doing this, I put it in air quotes,” he says. “Yes, I did lose $3,000 on the project, but I don’t feel like it. I’m pretty proud of it. For what it is, we still have fun with it. I see my two year-old daughter playing Sticky Bees and she figured out what to do on her own. There are still these spikes of satisfaction out of making something that’s at least fun.” 

For others that are hoping to create the next mobile craze, Matt Cox suggests that they enjoy the process but remain realistic in their ambitions. “Don’t expect success at all. Make sure you have some fun with it and you believe in what you’re doing. If you’re not going to have fun with your own game, nobody else will.”