Building games – interview in Warsaw Business Journal


Online gaming is going through a renaissance, with hundreds of websites offering free games to while away the time. One company making waves in the sector is Pastel Games – a Polish game developer responsible for such hits as the Submachine series and the Squirrel Family games. WBJ.pl speaks with company founders Mateusz Skutnik and Karol Konwerski about their their business model, the state of the industry and developing for the iPhone.

Roberto Galea: Since the flash games that you produce are free to play online, where does your income come from?

Mateusz Skutnik: The income comes from our sponsors. We sell games to online flash-game portals, such as Arcade Town, Spill Group, Armor Games and others. They pay us for ad space within the game, mostly logos and links redirecting to their portals.

Your flash games, including Submachine and the “room escape” series, have become immensely popular worldwide. What kind of reaction have you seen from the Polish gaming community?

 

MS: The gaming community in Poland reacted in much the same way as the rest of the world. They liked it. The developers did and so did the players. This is the kind of genre that suits everyone I guess. It’s something that you can’t really predict, but that is what’s most precious in this business.

How hard is it to break into the global gaming industry with so many artists competing for the spotlight?

MS: It’s harder than you’d think, because since every single game that you make is pure genius and fantastic for the creator, the only way to determine its value is to release it to the public and listen to what [players] have to say about it. Well, maybe not listen to their opinions, because the more people play, the more [their] comments become a white noise of polarized opinions ranging from love to hate. But the mere number of players says all that we need to know about a game. It is quite tricky, it took me about three years to find the specific genre that we’re good at and people love.

As an artist working in Poland, how does the country’s current social and political landscape fit into your work?

MS: Not much. Our creations are not locally based, they’re global, and keeping that in mind we don’t include social or political matters. We’re in no way dependent on the state of the country. All the work that we do goes straight abroad. We export our intellectual property mostly to Western Europe and US.

You also write games for the Apple iPhone. When it first came out, the iPhone took the world by storm as a fashion and technological breakthrough. Entrepreneurs are now realizing its business potential. How do you see the iPhone evolving as a tool in the coming months?

Karol Konwerski: Over the last year, the iPhone has become more of a handheld gaming console than just a multimedia gadget. Recently in the first time in history, the four-top selling applications at Apple’s App-store were games. Furthermore, something which is important for us, and on which we have based our business plan, is that the iPhone determines new trends for handheld gaming devices. The best proof of this is the new device from Sony – the Sony PSP Go. We can say that it’s more than just a temporary trend or fashion. What we are observing at the moment is just a natural progression of the whole gaming industry. That is why we haven’t had a problem finding an investor.

What management models do you practice at your company?

KK: To speak about management models, we have to separate flash-game development from iPhone games. In developing flash games we prefer to work with freelance graphic designers and programmers. As we have learned from practice, a team created specifically for a concrete project will be much more effective and creative [than a static team]. This is important for us – as well as for our clients and users – since you can tell exactly who was working on a specific game. That kind of “artistic touch,” let’s say, has distinguished our work from that of other flash-game developers. It is completely different when we talk about iPhone games. Developing games for Apple’s smartphone is much more complex than working on flash games. First of all, Apple’s device opened brand new possibilities for developers, [since] each game has to be totally unique but there are no solid programming grounds like in flash games. What we had to do was to create a developer engine. To do that we could not use freelancers. Right now we employ three full-time workers and three others for concrete tasks in two divisions – graphic design and programming.