What was the most challenging period for the business and how did you overcome it? One of our greatest challenges was pivoting Miniclip from being a games website to becoming a mobile developer and publisher. It was an extremely painful transition, which almost put us out of business, but thanks to the immense hard work and dedication of our teams we successfully reinvented ourselves on mobile, by leveraging our brand name and IP from the web.
Can you say why it was such a painful transition? During the late 2000’s we started to observe a massive shift in consumer behaviour as players migrated from the web to smartphones. Web revenues declined sharply, in line with users moving away from the platform, so we shifted all our chips across the table to bet on our mobile business. At the time, this was a huge gamble, as none of us knew how big the mobile market would become, but we had no option. The transition required us to go from being a publisher of predominantly Flash games on the web, to becoming a developer of mobile games. This was an enormous change for the business and funding it almost put us out of business.
Miniclip was among the first companies to receive a major investment from Tencent. What did that investment allow and how has it changed the company and its fortunes? Miniclip was one of the first European mobile studios to receive a majority investment by Tencent. Our experience of working with them over the last seven years has been a career highlight for me and many of my team. Tencent is the world’s largest games company with stakes
in Riot, Epic, Ubisoft, Supercell and many more incredible studios around the globe. As a game developer themselves, they know how important it is for any studio in their group to have a strong culture and sense of identity. They see their role as supporting and encouraging studios, allowing them to retain everything that has made them successful, rather than trying to optimise costs or integrate them. We have learned a huge amount from them about how to
manage acquisitions, which is why Miniclip has acquired more than eight game studios in the last few years and grown our company more than ten times bigger under their ownership.
How have you managed to maintain growth and not become akin to the MySpace of gaming? Like many successful businesses, luck has played an important part, but we have also stuck closely to our purpose of
60 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2022
unleashing the gamer in everyone. Our most important success
measure has always been audience growth, and we have been patient about how we monetise our games in order to provide our users with the best possible experience. That focus has helped to ensure
that our players remain loyal and that our franchises live for a very long time. We are also cautious about jumping on the next big thing,
which is particularly challenging today with NFTs, metaverse, AR, and VR creating so much buzz. We are very comfortable being late to the party with a very high-quality offering, than first with a half-baked product.
With the lead more into mobile, does it feel like the end of an era? We built the foundations of our business on browser-based games, and while the focus of Miniclip has shifted more towards mobile, web-based games will always be an important part of our history. We’ve got a long heritage of publishing some of the most
popular web-based games in the world, Club Penguin, RuneScape and
Agar.io to name a few, but our core focus since 2010 has very much been on the development of our mobile games portfolio. From our first viral hit with Dancing Bush on
Miniclip.com back in 2001, to our most popular game on mobile, 8 Ball Pool, our expertise spans multiple platforms and genres, and we’re using this experience to accelerate the growth of the business today.
How will you be celebrating this landmark year? After a challenging few years due to the impact of COVID-19, not just for Miniclip but across the whole world, we’re looking forward to getting back together in our newly refurbished offices to celebrate our successes and the upcoming evolution of
Miniclip.com. We’re looking forward to sharing the legacy of where it all started, and thanking our players and Miniclippers, past and present, for helping make the company a success.
What are you doing to ensure Miniclip’s best years are ahead of it? We continue to do what we have always done, which is to do the best job we can for our players, by improving the experiences in our existing games and investing heavily in our future product pipeline. We are also expanding our product focus far beyond multiplayer sports to a much broader range of genres through organic development and further M&A.
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