MOBILE | BETA Publishing Refuelled
Why did Brett Seyler leave a strong firm like engine outfit Unity? To start a new developer-centric publisher named Kerosene, he tells Will Freeman
LAST TIME DEVELOP caught up with Brett Seyler he was the general manager of Unity’s egalitarian Union publishing initiative. When he left the popular engine outfit amicably last year he all but vanished, taking himself out of the spotlight to work on his next project. For months he gathered resources and undertook research, expanding on years of study while readying something that remained a mystery to the rest of the industry. And now, Develop can reveal, the former
Garage Games man is ready to lift the lid on his newest venture; a developer-centric publishing infrastructure for mobile games studios by the name of Kerosene. The origin of the concept of Kerosene came about as Seyler began to consider how he could do more to help a number of mobile developers in which he had personally invested capital. Working with these companies, he found himself relishing the sector’s unstructured, unconsolidated nature, but was equally dismayed by the limitations imposed by existing publishing methods. “As soon as I left Unity, I knew I’d want to
help give some of these studios the luxuries and advantages of larger studios with great publishing technology and services, data science and design expertise,” Seyler tells Develop. “So, in rolling all that up, and sharing it across multiple studios, I quickly realised that I should just back a publishing venture of my own, complete with its own social plumbing, analytics, user acquisition partnerships, and so on.” And so it was that Kerosene was born, and
Seyler’s vision to offer a mobile-focused game publisher with a ‘new school’ approach to helping developers was realised.
TOOLS FOR THE TRADE Presently focused on iOS and Android, Kerosene essentially offers studios a suite of tools and services that can be integrated at various stages of a games development in a variety of ways. That on its own isn’t a unique proposition, but Seyler is confident he can offer enough to make Kerosene a distinct publishing model. In conversation Seyler mentions certain
core values over and over; he insists there is a devotion to developing IP and story, an emphasis on keeping customers interested through quality of gaming experience rather than ‘click addiction’ mechanics, and a respect for the developers that he believes larger publishers fail to prioritise. And then there’s the technology itself. “The technology is what separates it from being a normal publisher,” Seyler asserts. “I
DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
I quickly realised that I should just
back a publishing venture of my own, complete with its own social plumbing.
Brett Seyler, Kerosene
wanted to help with the same problems so many studios are facing; the ones in the App Store to do with managing their games and customer bases and deal with user acquisition. “I spent a lot of time looking at publishing options for the studios I’ve worked with, and I just didn’t like what I saw. There just hasn’t been much sophistication around user acquisition for publishers willing to really work fairly with third party games. “There’s not been the tech infrastructure that developers need right out of the gate to build truly social games, or at least to use truly social mechanics.”
Seyler is confident that numerous studios
are capable of designing those kind of games. But he believes that a lack of quality social plumbing in the mobile space means it has been hard for them to learn from the most valuable lessons in the online space. Kerosene can change this, he claims, and in doing so bring to being a new category of games for mobile – those illustrious ‘gamer’s games’ that he defines as “fun to play, hard to put down, with lots of passive progress and multiplayer engagement”. Seyler repeatedly compares the current social mobile space to the early days of
Many mobile publishing offerings lack the sophistication required, claims Kreosene founder Brett Seyler
MARCH 2012 | 31
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