The 3 things Pocket Playlab thinks an indie studio needs to focus on
Once upon a time, Pocket Playlab was a small studio in Bangkok that had nearly run out of funding. Today, it has two studios under its belt, is a Rovio Stars partner, and has over one million active users in its games.
But how did Pocket Playlab climb back up from the brink of almost-bankruptcy? At our Games in Asia Bangkok meetup, CEO and co-founder Jakob Lykkegaard shared three focuses the studio needed for its success.
(See: Juice Cubes: Hong Kong-made puzzle game gets a huge boost as it’s published by Rovio)
Focus on the core business
Pocket Playlab doesn’t do work for hire. It doesn’t do customized work. It doesn’t say yes to just everything, and boldly enough, it also doesn’t listen to its investors. Lykkegaard shared that when the studio was just starting out, it was doing work for hire and working on its own games on the side. However, working primarily on apps for other people took away its focus on its own IP.
The day Lykkegaard and his two other co-founders decided to cut off their work-for-hire arm, they started to burn a lot more money. The company’s existential runway was slashed to just half a year. But the focus and the passion on their own games came back.
Focus on the culture
Lykkegaard believes that a better culture can arise from having fewer policies. As a result, the Pocket Playlab studio subscribes to having a flat hierarchy. Game teams have producers with full autonomy when it comes to hiring people, choosing to do outsource work, or even implementing features they believe in but their bosses don’t. Developers at Pocket Playlab are people who can make good decisions and think individually, and the culture ticks because of that.
Folk at Pocket Playlab also believe that everything is their job. “With a game team, you have one goal, and that’s to keep your game successful,” Lykkegaard said. “There are no full command lines. You might have specialities, but everything is your job.”
(See: In 2017, the global games market will be Asian)
And of course, wrapping up the less-is-more company policy is transparency. Very few things have to go by the company’s C-level for approval. “It saves time when you don’t have to approve things,” Lykkegaard said. He shared that Pocket Playlab was in the midst of implementing even more transparency, opening up everything they had that “a normal company would hide”. Lykkegaard justified the move by explaining how a developer wouldn’t be able to decide if a new feature was a good move or not without analytics to aid his decision.
He added that “as a small startup, everyone knows everything,” and that Pocket Playlab wanted to keep things that way.
Focus on agility
Lykkegaard also touched on how it was important for a team to stay small and keep the momentum going. While his team is definitely not small anymore, it is still able to move and execute fast thanks to the initial two focuses. He also said it was important to find smart people, and to value your energy and time. Waste not, want not!
In a nutshell, keeping your team agile, without any weighty processes bogging your execution down, is a definite path to success.
(See: Mobile game revenue in Asia is almost two-and-a-half times of that of America)
Bonus: don’t mistake tools for culture
There was an extremely important point Lykkegaard touched on in the middle of his presentation. Free lunches, ping pong tables, nerf guns—these are all items that Pocket Playlab has lying around in the office. But it isn’t their culture. These items are tools, and Lykkegaard stressed that it was important not to mistake them for being the actual culture.
From his talk, it was easy to take away what culture in a company really is: it’s how a company runs. How it plays, eats, breathes, and lives. A nerf gun is not the same as a process walking you from the start of one task, to its end.
Don’t make that mistake, either!
Pocket Playlab is a Rovio Stars partner with headquarters in Hong Kong and production teams in Bangkok and Philippines. Its Rovio-approved game, Juice Cubes.
More juice, anyone?
Juice Cubes: a well-made Candy Crush clone
Rovio Entertainment’s third Rovio Stars game Juice Cubes is well made, yet nothing spectacular. A match-3 puzzle game after Candy Crush Saga's heart.
The post The 3 things Pocket Playlab thinks an indie studio needs to focus on appeared first on Games in Asia.
The post The 3 things Pocket Playlab thinks an indie studio needs to focus on appeared first on Games in Asia.
