PlayFirst Grapevine

Hello, Friends of PlayFirst!!! Tomorrow, April 15, is the four-year anniversary of the founding of PlayFirst. As I reflect on the amazing progress we have made over the last four years, I thought you might like to hear a bit of the story behind the company we have built. You are a critical part of that “we,” because we couldn’t have done it without you. And there’s a lot more coming; I’ve never been more excited about the products (we are building. I hope you stick around to help us take it to the next level. So, with that introduction as to why I’m writing, I’ll start the story.

Today PlayFirst is a company of 85 people. We had almost $10 million in revenue in 2007 (note that it’s ‘revenue’ and not ‘profit,’ as we are not yet profitable). But not so long ago we were much, much smaller. This time four years ago, all there was to PlayFirst was me, my co-founder Brad, and a not-too-fancy Powerpoint deck full of our dreams to build a game company. Then, almost magically, the next day it was me, Brad, the Powerpoint deck, and five million dollars of venture capital. We were off to the races!

Of course, it’s not that easy to talk professional investors out of $5 million on just a set of slides. In fact, raising capital is one of the most difficult and least enjoyable aspects of running a business. But since neither of us had the bankroll to fund the company ourselves, it was a necessary ingredient to build our dream. In addition to the slides, we did have between us over thirty years experience creating software and ten years or so working with video games, which is really what our “Series A” investors were betting would pay off. We have been extremely fortunate to land excellent investors. Raising money isn’t fun, but working with our investors has been a very positive experience on both a personal and professional level.

With the funding in hand, and the crazy risk of starting a company properly transferred from entrepreneurs to investors, the next set of tasks was pretty straightforward: We had to find office space, start building stuff, and hire an amazing team to help us build more stuff faster. One of our first investors, Mayfield, offered to put us up on a temporary basis in their posh office space on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park until we could secure permanent space in San Francisco. This let us hit the ground running. OK, check! Next we needed to build stuff and hire people.

“Building stuff” started with games. As a publisher, our business model was to create about 20% of our games with internal development teams and 80% with outside partners. One great thing about this model is that we could start right away, before hiring any permanent staff. So, as soon as the funding hit our bank account, I put my game producer hat on and contacted the most talented designer I knew, Eric Zimmerman over at GameLab. The GameLab crew had designed and built great web games for me when I was running the games business at Shockwave.com. This was way back in 2000 or so, but you can still play BLiX (http://blix.shockwave.com) and Loop (http://loop.shockwave.com) on the Shockwave site today. I knew that a key validation of my model was to get super creative folks like those at GameLab excited to build games for PlayFirst, and I’m pretty sure you’ll agree we were successful in this area.

As a follow-up to our conversation, Eric sent me a document entitled “Seven Downloadable Game Concepts” in late May 2004. We selected two of those seven concepts to build out into full games. We signed a contract, and GameLab started building the games we’d selected. One of the concepts was “The Underground,” which became Subway Scramble. This was and still is one of my favorite casual games. It was fun, frantic and innovative, with a simple game mechanic that gets incredibly complex to play as you progress through the 50 levels. It brought a fresh aesthetic to the genre, with graphical elements calling to mind a map of the London Underground. Unfortunately, Subway Scramble was more of a critical success than a market success. Still, we sell a few copies of this gem every day on PlayFirst.com.

The other concept was called “Lunch,” designed by Nick Fortugno (now co-founder of Rebel Monkey: http://www.rebelmonkey.com/about.html). “Lunch” is now known to over 200 million people worldwide as Diner Dash. The story ultimately diverged a bit from the original description (e.g., Flo is the one packing the tables into her own restaurant and the cook is a good-guy), but the game mechanic is still true to the original pitch. Fans of the franchise know that the game has evolved quite a bit from the original (keep sending in your ideas!), with new gameplay elements in Diner Dash 2: Restaurant Rescue, customizable outfits for Flo in Diner Dash: Flo on the Go, and too many new features to talk about here (and anyway Nemone already discussed them here) in Diner Dash: Hometown Hero.

While I was busy signing and producing games with talented outside partners, Brad was busy inventing stuff on the inside. We didn’t originally plan to create a game development kit, but we pretty quickly realized that the ideal ecosystem for creating the games we wanted to create didn’t exist. We required the power and flexibility of the C++ programming language, but raw C++ was too complicated and error prone for what we felt should be a creative, not highly technical process. Higher-level platforms like Flash and Shockwave could give our game designers a more convenient way to express themselves, but with unacceptable performance, feature and distribution limitations. So we decided to create Playground SDK (the technically minded folks out there can check it out here). Originally it was optional to our external partners, but now we require with very rare exceptions that all PlayFirst games are created on Playground. Chocolatier and Dream Chronicles are two of my favorite Playground based games. Last year we decided to release the SDK to developers worldwide for use free of charge, and now many other companies are using it to create games. Let us know if you’d like to hear more about Playground SDK and perhaps we can get Brad to make a Grapevine post.

So now we were building stuff, and we needed to hire folks to help us build more stuff. Back then most people considered us a bit nuts to think that “regular people” wanted to play games – surely games were just for teenage boys and adult teenage boys, right? So they should all have aliens or dragons, magic spells or at least big explosions, with women as exaggerated props rather than empowered protagonists!?! Not true! Again, a great topic for a future Grapevine, as that topic deserves its own spotlight. Anyway, it wasn’t easy to convince prospective employees that people other than teenage boys like to play games, but we managed to convince enough people that we were able to hire a great initial crew. And then we were truly off and running.

Back to the present. We have now raised a total of $26.5 million in external financing, and we’re well financed to continue to grow the company. Yes, this transferred the risk from the founders to professional investors, but in a way there’s actually more and more risk as we have grown: now 85 people depend on PlayFirst to provide for their livelihood and their families. This is an enormous responsibility that has certainly kept me awake at night in the past. It represents the serious side of running a company that makes video games. On the other hand, every employee is also a shareholder, so if we succeed in building PlayFirst into a company like Electronic Arts or Disney, then everyone will share in that success. And we get to have a ton of fun doing it, because we do love our games! If we’re not there yet, PlayFirst has definitely turned a corner. We’re not yet a Disney, but nor are we a rickety startup any longer. We have developed or published over thirty games, and over a million people come to our site each month to play them. Most of you aren’t teenage boys or adult teenage boys. In fact, most of you are teenage girls or adult teenage girls! So now it’s my precious first child Nathaniel (19 weeks old) that gets the honors of keeping me awake at night.

I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into the past. One of the great things about being an internet focused company is that we get to have a two-way conversation with our customers. I’ve been watching your comments over the years on the forums and in the messages sent in to Customer Support, and now I’ve started sharing my thoughts. Please let me know what you would like to hear about next and I’ll do my best to respond. Until then, please continue writing in the forums so we know what to do next. ;-)

• Avatar: Though its original meaning comes from the Hindu to describe an earthly representation of a deity, in gaming the term has come to mean a computerized representation of yourself, or any character you’d like to create, that lives within the world of a game. Avatars are almost always created in the same visual style as the game in which you place them, and the best avatars are customizable, meaning that you, as the player, get to make decisions about how that little pixilated representation of you will look.
• Metamap: You know how when you’re playing a game you can pause or stop, exit to the main menu, and then come back in to a map of the game showing where you’ve been and where you have yet to go? That’s a metamap, sometimes referred to as a “level map.” At its simplest, a metamap just shows you what level you’re on and gives you a little bread crumb trail showing how many more levels you have left to go to finish the game. A more complex metamap might jump you around to explore different areas (or neighborhoods) of the game. The best metamaps are expandable, meaning that you can see the whole game the way it’s laid out when you purchase it, but you can also add new areas as the game expands, either by uncovering them during game play or by buying them separately and having them integrated into the game you already have once they’re downloaded. You can think of it like a Legos kit (or K’nex, or what have you) – you can do all kinds of things with the basic set, but you can also always add more to keep yourself engaged and entertained. This same expandability can be applied to a computer game through use of the metamap.
• Multiplayer: Think of “single player” as solitaire and “multiplayer” as poker. In gaming, multiplayer refers to any game you can play with other people, in real time, even while sitting all alone at your computer. Maybe you’ve heard of MMORPGs, or “Mass Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games,” like World of Warcraft or Everquest or Star Wars Galaxies. In these games, people all over the world have their own avatar and literally thousands of people can meet in a virtual environment to play together. But those are all pretty hardcore, time-intensive, sub-culture games. Multiplayer can also be much simpler and less overwhelming, like a group of people gathering in a chat room and choosing one other person to play with or against in a smaller virtual environment which they control.