LKWD’S MD-LF CRSS
The creator of Avakin Life has been having a difficult twelve months. Richie Shoemaker spoke to CEO Halli Thor Bjornsson about turning things around
L
ockwood Publishing, often stylised as LKWD (pesky vowels, always getting in the way), is known for two things: It’s flagship
mobile title Avakin Life, seen as the successor to Playstation Home, and in recent months getting a bad rap whenever it has had to let some of its staff go. It has done so twice in the space of a year. Last December 10% of staff were made redundant, then in September it was announced that another 15% of staff would be cut loose. Not a good look, especially when the first round was claimed to be unlawful by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). Whatever the legality, it was inevitable that the headlines were recalled when the second round was reported. Not a good look either that Avakin Life is considered a successful
LOCKWOOD AND LOADED Well, not really. LKWD posted a small loss last year (so that’s where those OOO’s went), which suggests either Avakin is having a mid-life crisis, or the company is investing in new technologies to stave it off. Possibly both, given that when announcing a second wave of redundancies to staff in September, CEO Halli Thor Bjornsson spoke of “worsening economic conditions” necessitating Lockwood “adjust and adapt” to meet them.
Halli Thor Bjornsson, Lockwood CEO.
The restructuring that is currently underway, into
which Tencent has invested, makes sense when you consider that over the course of nine years, 30,000
game. The company boasts more than 200 million accounts. There are eight to ten million users per month, we’re told, which can rise to a million in a day during special events like Halloween. According to SensorTower, Lockwood brought in over a million dollars of mobile app store revenue in September alone (which doesn’t seem like an awful lot in the grand scheme of things), just as the news was circulating that people would be losing their jobs ahead of record rises in living costs. Then there is the fact that Lockwood received a 25 million dollar investment from moneybags Tencent two years ago. By all rights Lockwood should be loaded, right?
38 | MCV/DEVELOP October/November 2022
items of clothing and other in-game objects have been introduced to Avakin Life, all of them created in-house. They have all directly contributed to Lockwood’s revenues to some extent, but in an age where the volume and consistency of user generated content directly impacts a game’s longevity and is very much the basis of many in-game economies (and very likely, for better or worse, to become the future of them), it was perhaps inevitable that Lockwood would have to one day remodel Avakin’s boutique department store into something more akin to a marketplace. “That’s the direction we’re going.”
confirms Bjornsson, saying that Avakin will over the coming years be a platform to create content. “We always wanted to do that, right from the beginning. We’ve been investing in tools and technology
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