BETA | THE £150,000 APP
The CWA has previously attempted to break into the apps market with childrens games Nursery Rhymes and Papercut
Mills is keen to highlight the extent of
promotional effort, but like so many before him, he subscribes to the school of thought that the secret of success in the iOS market comes down, first and foremost, to the quality of your game. “If the product was crap, it wouldn’t have
done well,” offers the man whose job title reads ‘Chief Wonka’. “It’s hard not to sound like a twat here, but people genuinely seem to like it. And not just mates and people who have to be nice. Wherever we’ve taken it or sent it, people like Whale Trail. It is pretty good, we reckon.” Despite that confidence in Ustwo’s latest
project, Mills is quick to recognise the huge risk in devoting £150,000 – written off or otherwise – to an idea for a game: “If we just wanted to make money straight up we wouldn’t have developed a game.” The efforts of CWA took a significant
percentage of Ustwo staff away from the company’s more commercial endeavours. Time was sunk into declining the advances of large-scale publishers hungry for a bite of the Whale Trail pie, and an obsession with polish soaked up hundreds of those infamous 1,500 man-hours. Mills admits it was hard for those at Ustwo
who worked outside the inner circle of creativity that CWA was becoming. After all, how were the rank-and-file Ustwo staff
20 | DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012
supposed to feel about a select ten freed from commercial pressure? However, the reality of the CWA work was
far tougher than it may have seemed from those not intimate with the development of Whale Trail. “I don’t think we ever got near the point of thinking ‘fuck this’ and giving up, but there
I’d like to spend a million on the CWA
next year, which would mean doubling its size. That’s where the innovation lies.
Mills, Ustwo
was enormous pressure from us and from the rest of the studio for the game to be a hit,” admits McFarland. “Everyone else at Ustwo was working hard making the money for the studio, and that was really quite stressful, even if we’re confident as a small team. And the rest of the company don’t really know what we’re doing in the CWA. They could have thought we were just having a laugh.”
NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE SUCCESS Stressful it may have been, but Whale Trail is starting to do very well indeed. Mills’ dream of selling the game one million times by this Christmas is looking increasingly like it could happen, and the hype continues to mount. Making a profit is looking like a certainty, which in turn is good news for all at Ustwo, because all the extra cash Whale Trail raises will be invested back into the studio. In fact, much of it looks destined to be used to create a bigger, better, more attitude-filled CWA. “If Whale Trail doesn’t do well financially,
that’s OK. We’re fine with that. But if it does do well financially, next year we’ll spend even more money,” states a clearly confident Mills. “I’d like to spend a million on the CWA next year, which would mean doubling its size and maybe having 20 people on it. That’s where the innovation lies. Whale Trail might just do pretty well, but if it does ‘millions well’, then potentially I guess we could break that out. I’d love it to blossom into something far more substantial than raising awareness.” Some will have written off Ustwo as
chancers with too much cash and confidence, but the fact is that every day Whale Trail is gaining momentum and sales, and at the current rate, Mills might just have the chance to realise his ambition. “There’s only one thing,” he jokes. “We still don’t know how to make games.”
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