and doing something new. Building things for the first time, putting in place all the infrastructure and processes that get you to win. “When you get acquired you move into a different
phase that’s much more about growth and stability. It’s a different type of energy. To an extent you do lose yourself in that because it’s no longer your show and you’re part of a much bigger thing. There are definitely some people who are well attuned to being in a big corporate machine, that’s where they can really do their best work. Other people are better at doing things that are more entrepreneurial, more agile, maybe require different types of leadership. I think that probably sums Alex and I up. We were much more interested in that kind of energy and those kinds of spaces. “I like companies that are reasonably small,” continues
Gouge. “I like to work with less than a hundred people. For me, when you make a game, that is a really good number. Below a hundred people you can still communicate effectively. Strong iteration and rapid communication are much more challenging in larger organisations. We want to be big in terms of success. We want to be small in terms of headcount, because I think that is a good thing for this market. “Playdemic got to about 70, 80 people, but in terms of
those that were committed to operating Golf Clash; from development through to user acquisition, to customer support to QA, to community management, etc, that was about 40 people, and that those 40 people generated 100 million in profit a year and over a billion of revenue. That was an incredible success story for a small number of people. That is the kind of team that I love being part of and trying to help shape. “There are very few markets where you can actually
do that, and it’s very hard to do that in other areas of the games industry; to say, ‘I’m going to build a billion dollar company with 30, 40 people. That just doesn’t make sense
if you’re thinking about triple-A console or other areas of the market. Whereas in mobile, you can potentially operate every aspect of the service of that game in terms of bringing it to market. So, yeah, for me that’s really that’s a really big part of the attraction of wanting to be in this space and at that size.”
INNOVATIVE TECH ForthStar’s founders have been fortunate to have been around at the right time to capitalise on the many innovations that mobile gaming has brought to (some might say wrought on) the industry. BattleMail for example was dabbling in free-to-play and live service ops before many knew what either term meant. Later on, Rockpool Games was knocking out early mobile games based on such established IP as Sonic the Hedgehog, Tomb Raider, WWE, Worms and Spongebob Squarepants, most if not all screeching into the pre-touchscreen top 10. Then there was Playdemic of course, which was founded in the midst of Facebook’s ascension as a gaming destination and in the wake of the App Store coming online. Which begs the question, is that hunger for innovation still there and how might it be manifested in the months ahead? “I do see ForthStar as an innovative company and I
think the innovation is based on our approach to game development, and also our approach to publishing. We’ve seen the emergence of free-to-play and games-as-a-service really take hold of the platform and there’s been a lot of new skills and technologies developed along the way. And I think that whilst we’re not launching into a new platform as we historically have done, what we are trying to do is really utilise the knowledge and experience we’ve got so far to to iterate and improve other things. “One example of that is AI. I know AI is on everyone’s
lips, but AI is something that we started using at Playdemic quite a long time ago. We were calling it machine learning at the time, which doesn’t sound quite as sexy as some of the things that are around at the moment, but we were using it to do elements of really important work. Part of that was dedicated to our user acquisition efforts. Part was understanding and getting better data on insights from players. Part of that was based on our economies and trying to understand how to do that better.” So important to ForthStar is AI that Playdemic’s Head
of AI has joined the team. “We were very fortunate to hire many people from Playdemic,” says Gouge. “Our Head of AI was at Playdemic with us and what his job is now is to look at the much broader suite of tools that are coming to market and say, ‘How can I point these tools to every aspect of our game development to improve our ability
18 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2024
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