TiramaSue wrote:

It's been over a year since BoomZap and Big Fish parted company.  As to why BoomZap joined forces with GameHouse - I guess they discovered that the Asian mobile market for free-to-play games wasn't as lucrative as they thought.  And twice they tried to get funding on some site so that they could make 'the kind of game they themselves wanted to play' and failed to get enough people to pledge funds.

Sad.  I saw a comment from Chris Natsuume about how the release of Awakening: The Goblin Kingdom Collector's Edition  was the start of the 3 most profitable years the company had.  Shame they appear to have thrown that away.  The other co-founder of the company seems to go out of his way to bad-mouth BF.  Wonder how long before history repeats itself and BoomZap complains about making the kind of games GameHouse sells.
 

Thanks for the info, Tirama!  

What I don't understand is why Boomzap would agree to develop a game that has to stick to a formula and that they can't add anything to.  It's just a question of getting the engine and adapting it to a new game that's exactly like all the others; only the story is different.  Maybe it was simply a question of money?  They used to make fantastic HOPAs and I always thought it was a shame that they decided to go the mobile route ... apart from the latest PC game that they've made, the RPG.  Maybe that one didn't do nearly as well as they'd expected, as maybe they released that on their own and, without the support of a publishing company, like BFG and GH, they wouldn't have the customer base that they'd need.


 

TiramaSue wrote:

I think BoomZap spread themselves too thin, had trouble holding on to employees (not everybody is cut out to work at home) and took on projects that they probably didn't have enough skill to tackle.  Their Antique Road Trip free-to-play game had major bugs in the initial release and in every subsequent update, most of which weren't released on time.

Will be interesting to see if they make more games for GameHouse and if any lessons were learned from their time with Big Fish.

Looking at the BoomZap forums, I don't see any mention of Cathy's Crafts.  The titles of the forums are revealing.  All the HOPA's developed for Big Fish are grouped together under Casual Games.  The games they self-published are grouped together under BoomZap Studios - Real Gamers, Real Games.  Right Now.  Still showing a bit of contempt for the people who put money in their pockets.

Oh well.  Got to get back to playing my unreal games made for babies.

  I never realised I played unreal games!  

Although GameHouse is part of a company called RealArcade, or something like that, so what's Boomzap doing with them?

I hadn't previously looked at the Forums over at Boomzap but I just took a look then after reading your post and what I noticed is that all their HOPA games are grouped separately under the tile of HOPA Games, or something like that, but if you take a look at the threads under each of the groups of games, the HOPA games have thousands more threads and posts than any of the other games they develop, and the latest posts are quite recent, long after they'd stopped developing HOPAs.  Surely that tells them something?  But there may not yet be a forum for Cathy's Crafts as it was only released yesterday.

And if you look at the Home Page, Cathy's Crafts is there with all their other games.  I clicked on the banner and it took me to GH, although the link was incorrect and I got an error message.  So I tried one of their HOPA games and was taken to BFG.  Then I tried their multiplayer game and was taken to Steam.  Lastly I tried one of the mobile games and there are links to the usual mobile places - Google Play, etc.  So they don't sell anything on their own and sell through several different places.

And now that it's well after 2 am I think I'd better do what babies do best ...
 

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TiramaSue wrote:

I don't think anybody is allowed to sell or provide mobile apps unless they go through Amazon, GooglePlay, and the Apple Store. 

I've always wondered why, when you wanted to purchase an app from anyone, you were redirected to Amazon or Google Play, etc.  Who would have decided that, given that Apple and Android are on either side of the fence?

There are three entities involved in getting a game to a player.  Developer, Publisher, Distributor.

GooglePlay, Amazon, the App Store (iOS products) are distributors.

BoomZap is the developer.

Big Fish is a publisher for some games (they provide the developer with $$$$$ to make the games).  They also distribute some games (the Emily games, for example).

I'd never considered publishers and distributors as separate entities.  I'd just always assumed that distributors were also publishers and vice versa.  But now that you've pointed this out, there's one distributor (I can't think of their name right now) who I think might just be a distributor but not a publisher.  Interesting...

Many developers are self-publishing their mobile games.  Since BF or GH can't sell them directly, some developers feel that they don't need a publisher because a publisher can't do anything to help get their games noticed over at Amazon, GooglePlay, etc. 

I was checking out GH's pages for potential developers and one reason they suggest why iOS and Android developers should talk to them is:

"You have apps on iTunes and Google Play, but the numbers aren't what you'd hoped for."

I think Steam might be a publisher of some games, I'm not really sure what's going on with their greenlighting projects (I think it's Steam).

Steam seems to be taking over the gaming world but I refuse to get involved.  GOG now offers a Steam key for at least some of their games - but it's a choice.  Whereas GamersGate just suddenly made some of my bought games Steam-only games, so I can no longer download and play them because I don't have a Steam account - and have no intention of ever getting one.  That I feel is so wrong.  I wrote to GG and asked them about it and they just said that it wasn't up to them but up to the developers.  Yeah, right.  So why does GOG give you the choice?

One of the co-owners of BoomZap made a remark about the escalating costs of making HOPAs and how he didn't understand how 'The Serbians' (meaning Eipix) were able to make so many of them and that soon, only 'The Serbians' and 'The Russians'  (Elephant Games?) would be the only companies making HOPAs.  Reading between the lines, I got the impression that they wanted more $$$$$ than BF was willing to give them.

Did they forget about Ukraine (ERS) and Poland?

Russia  -  Elephant, Domini, Daily Magic
Serbia  -  Eipix, Mad Head
Ukraine  -  ERS, Blam!
Poland  -  Artifex Mundi
Hungary  -  Sunward

But I can't see them getting any more money from GH than they got from BFG.  But maybe they burned their bridges with BFG and so have had to look elsewhere.  However, given the different payment/reward systems of BFG (and who pays full price for any game now that there's a sale on every day?) and GH (who has a much better reward system for members but no sales, as well as their FunPass system), maybe the royalties work differently and the developers get more of a cut?
  

.
I was looking at what GH can offer developers and found out some interesting stats that surprised me, as I didn't think GH was that big ...

They have 30 million monthly users!
They have 5,432 games!
They have over 300 game developer relationships!
    (there are that many developers????)
They have paid over $150 million in royalties to developers!
They have expert localization in 8 languages.
They have over 13 million unique visitors per month across its global properties!
They have over 300,000 social media followers!

I wonder what BFG's figures are ...


 

All this has been pretty interesting reading.   Regarding Boomzap, when they left BF, I had a feeling that they weren't doing themselves any favors leaving like they did.  You should always leave a employer or anyone who is making you money on good terms just in case you need to come back.  One should never burn their bridge behind them.  

I did the beta on Vermillion Watch and thought it was pretty good, so I am glad to see that you really liked it, stusue.  I should have gotten it on the July 4th BOGO, but didn't.  I'll wait for the next BOGO.

It is a good thing I haven't bought many games at Gamersgate.  I bought only a few, which The Walking Dead is one of them that I bought from GG that needed to be activated at Steam.  I didn't like that so I bought The Walking Dead season 1 as a Xbox 360 game.  I'll have to check on my other 3 games to see if I can d/l them from GG or if I need to activate them at Steam.

I finished the main game of Fright.  The developer is Lesta Studios which I have been trying to find what other HOPA games that they have done since I really enjoyed this one.  Haven't found very much about them besides Insider Tales was one of their earlier ones. 



 

Tirama, thanks for all that info!  

GH has been 10 years "in the biz" as they say, so a few years younger than BFG.  And they also have 3 locations around the world - Seattle like BFG (I wonder how close they are to each other...), São Paulo in Brazil and Eindhoven in the Netherlands (I'd love to go and visit them there and see how it all works). 

But do you know how many employees BFG has?  GH has a total of 146 workers in the 3 locations, with a combined height of 791'7" (their page is really funny).  They have cartoon faces of a group of people with several saying hello in different languages, titled "The GameHouse Crew", and underneath the title it says, "(Not actual photographs.)".



Okay, maybe you have to see it to find it funny...

As for GH and games that are no longer offered by them because the developers have pulled the plug on those games, if it's a game that you got from GH itself, not the previous company, you can still download it, you just can't buy it.  You just have to let GH know and you can still download it.

And I had a whole heap of games with another publisher that either went belly up or changed focus (I never could find out which) and lost all those games.  I couldn't even find them to ask them about it and I never got any sort of notice that I should download everything before they closed down their casual games business.  The games were downloaded on my old computer which died, hence why I lost all those games. Had I known, I could have downloaded them all onto my new computer before they were no longer available.  Maybe it was on their site but we should have been given notice as that way I would have known!

Tirama wrote:

... they wanted to make real games, games that they themselves would want to play, instead of HOPAS (which they equated to making games for babies).  Maybe making dash-type TM's is a step up to them - maybe they consider those as games for children. 

   Good one!  I'm still laughing about that...