B
usiness pairing Paul Gouge and Alex Rigby, who together established BattleMail in 1999, Rockpool Games in 2002 and
Playdemic in 2009, insist they thought long and hard before calling their latest enterprise ForthStar Games. Sadly, the name was announced in the same week that Hundred Star Games, another UK startup studio with similar pedigree, revealed itself to the world. “It’s the fourth company
that Alex and I have started together,” says Gogue “and we thought spelling it that way, (Forth), indicates that as we get older, we have to remind ourselves to keep moving forward. The star is a homage to the Playdemic logo, which has a big place in our hearts. We wanted a nod to that as well.” Based in Cheshire (literally 50 yards from my
house, in fact), Playdemic is by far the duo’s most successful venture. Founded in 2009, the mobile studio was among the first to embrace the App Store with games like Quiz Buddies and Gang Nations. It then hit paydirt with the BAFTA- winning Golf Clash in 2017, which has been downloaded more than 100 million times and spurred EA to acquire the studio in 2021 for $1.4 billion. It remains the most expensive buyout of a UK-only developer. (Small beans in comparison to the $68.7 billion Microsoft shelled out for Activision, of course, but EA paid five times more per employee.) Soon after the deal went
through, Gouge and Rigby made their exit and have been living a life of gilded leisure, more or less, ever since. So what’s the appeal of getting back in the trenches? “The real reason is because we love to do it
relevant and still current – to go for it again. It was really that wanting to build something, to grow something, to use the knowledge and expertise that we’ve got and really go for it.
THE RIGHT TIME Paul Gouge is adamant that he’s not quite really to put his feet up quite yet, but why pack the slippers and sweatpants away now, with investment being scaled back and companies letting go of thousands of people? “We definitely recognise the market conditions. The
“We really felt that we had the energy, the
expertise and the knowledge to go for it again”
and we think we’re good at it,” says Gouge. “... and we’ve been reasonably successful. We built some companies and we’ve sold some companies and we really love games.” Mass-market, self- published titles especially. “We really felt that we had the energy, the expertise, the knowledge – still
way that I see this is that, having been around and making games now for 24 years, we’ve seen a lot of cycles come and go. Ultimately, if you zoom right in, you could argue that 2023-24 doesn’t look like a good time to be in mobile games. But actually, if you zoom out, it is still the biggest platform in video games. In 2023, $107 billion was spent on playing mobile games. All the data shows us people are spending more time on their mobiles than ever before. There’s still a huge demand out there for mobile entertainment. It’s always been pretty hard. It’s never been easy to bring these things to market. So our view is that, yes, if you focus in on the end of the telescope that makes everything look really big right now, you’d be scared off. We’re in this for the longer term. The markets will do their normal cycles, but what we are convinced of is that mobile is still a really important platform for gaming, and we have some knowledge and expertise that I think narrows our odds on being successful in that
market. Also we love doing it, so we want to give it a good old go.”
SIZE MATTERS It’s fair to say that Gouge and Rigby have given things a pretty good go already with Playdemic. Too good a go if the scale of its acquisition is anything to go by. What challenges remain, one wonders. “For any entrepreneur, a lot of the things that get you out of bed in the morning are about creation
December/January 2024 MCV/DEVELOP | 17
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