作者：Dean Takahashi

Perry Tam在2009年3月与他人联合成立Storm8时，并非一位经验丰富的手机/社交游戏开发者。本来，他是Facebook平台上从事支付技术的开发者，然而他预见了手机平台的潜在发展趋势。随着iPhone的问世，Storm8抓住这一时机，成为奉行“移动优先”战略的游戏公司。

现在Storm8以超过3亿的下载量及1亿的用户量领先于众多对手。每天，有600多万用户玩Storm8游戏（这个数据同比上季度增长20%）。公司最先在iOS（包括iPad、iPod Touch和iPhone）及Android平台上以角色扮演游戏为主导。其中热作包括Storm8制作的《World War》、《Racing Live》、《Pets Live》、《iMobsters》和《Vampires Live》。还有旗下Team Lava团队制作的《Bakery Story》、《Restaurant Story》、《City Story》、《Farm Story》和《Fashion Story》。Perry白手起家，该公司现在员工数扩增到150人。Storm8的一些对手匿名控告它在营销策略上的作弊行为，比如使用自动化程序。但Tam对此表示否认，并表示公司是靠正确途径获得所有用户。

虽然不少其它手机游戏发行商已被收购，但是Tam公司仍保持独立性，它紧跟手机游戏领域的最新动态。该公司最近推出一款街机模式的射击游戏《Bubble Mania》（Storm8所涉猎的新游戏类型），这款游戏三天内就突破100万次下载量，且未在市场营销上投入一分钱。Perry Tam在最近采访中介绍了相关营销策略：

能否同我们分享下Storm8的初始创业经历？公司是如何召集团队？成立公司的动机是什么？

这要追溯到2009年3月。那时我在Facebook支付服务团队，负责创建Facebook信用系统。我们看到社交游戏在Facebook平台上的盛行。社交游戏于2009年初出现，当时代表作为《Mafia Wars》。那时还未出现《FarmVile》。然而我们却已经看到社交游戏的成效。朋友们聚在一起玩游戏是件多么有趣的事，而当时我们并不了解游戏的运营模式。

在这不久后，iPhone问世。苹果开放了SDK（软件开发工具包），向人们呈现了为App Store制作应用的平台。我们看着iPhone感叹道，哇，这将改变人们同移动设备互动的方式。这一设备也改变了游戏。所以我们将社交游戏和手机游戏这两个理念结合——向人们提供社交游戏是个不错的方式，于是我们成立了Storm8。我们从Facebook上挖掘了一些人才，壮大我们的队伍。最初，公司是在我的起居室内运营。

现在我们拥有150名员工。实际上，我们是在去年才扩大到此规模，今年，我们打算将人数再扩增两倍。目前，我们的办公面积为3万平方英尺，占据了整栋建筑物的一半，最近我们又租下其余空间，打算十月份的时候，让员工覆盖5万平方英尺的区域。我们还有扩展的空间。这也是我们的发展目标。所以你应该知道了我们在去年达到日收益百万美元的佳绩。同时，最近我们的网络获得了3亿次来自1亿部设备的下载量。而且，随着《Bubble Mania》的发行，我们网络的的日活跃用户（DAU)也超过了600万。

这是一种自然发展，对吗？你们是从基础发展起来的。

这不单是自然的发展。就公司投资方面，这更是一种自力更生模式。我们并未得到外部资金赞助。我们的每一分费用都是公司创造的。我们并未进行任何收购，所以我们聘请的每一个员工都是一同系统成长的。

所有员工都Redwood Shores地区工作吗？还是现在你在其它地区也设有办公室？

不，大家都在同个地区工作。我们并未在其它地方设立办公室。我们相信，大家一起共事非常重要，这可归结于多种原因。首先，我们注重企业文化。如果我们也在其它地方成立工作室，那么就无法向其他团队传播我们的企业文化。其次，我们有开发速度的要求。我们的研发周期极短。为了加快进程，以最快速度制作高品质的游戏，我们需要大家时时集中注意力。他们需挨个坐着。他们需要分享各自的创意。他们需要尽快解决问题。总之，大家一起共事尤为关键。

对于先发展还是先扩展问题，你是如何安排的？扩展方式如何？你可以采取各种各样的战略。你的许多对手公司已被收购，比如ngmoco现在已经是DeNA的一部分。Gree刚以2亿1千万美元收购了Funzio。Zynga也收购了不少公司。可是你仍选择独立模式。

我们的策略无疑就是保持独立性。从我们的角度来看……有些事情可能有助于公司更快发展。我们自筹资金，并未依靠他人。但是这种结构却给予我们许多自由空间。我们掌控着自己的命运。这有利于我们公司的发展。

对于开发游戏的目标平台，你有何看法？

游戏开发前，我们就不断地寻找扩展机会。扩展方式之一就是制作不同风格的游戏。比如，《Bubble Mania》就是是我们全新的制作风格。另一方式为进军多种平台。我们已向不同平台发展，比如，2009年我们最先进军iOS平台。2010年，我们进军Android平台。那时平台上的竞争并非如此激烈。今年我们在亚马逊平台上发行游戏。这是另一平台的扩展。我们不断寻求游戏生态系统中的重要平台，并向此平台扩展。在此我需强调，我们会关注任何与手机相关的事情。

能否具体阐述下亚马逊平台上的游戏发行经历。你们在第一个月取得不错的成绩。现在的发展如何？

运作一切良好。我们是他们在IAP业务上的首航合作伙伴。我们的游戏绑定了他们的IAP服务，第一个月给我们带来了不少惊喜。绑定该服务让我们第一个月创收70多万美元。从那以后，我们持续看到了亚马逊平台的重大优势。

亚马逊宣称9月6号将有所行动。我想他们是否也打算进军手机行业……

我们很想看看他们在9月会有哪些惊人之举。他们制作的任何移动设备对这一行业生态圈来说都是一个福音。

只要你的公司扩大，就会有些流言蜚语。当前你的游戏都无法避免。我将此问题归结为第一类——来自“竞争对手的批评”。例如，有人怀疑你的游戏非常普通，它们看起来就像复制品。许多Storm8的游戏看起来像复制品。你会对此作出回应吗？

当然会。我希望所有人都能够明白……我们不是只会一种招式的小公司。实际上我们公司是多才多艺的。2009年我们开始创立Storm8这个品牌的时候，我们制作了RPG游戏。2010年，我们启动了另一品牌TeamLava，主要负责制作人们喜欢的故事情节游戏。比如《Restaurant Story》和《Farm Story》。到了2011年，我们组建了FireMocha团队，负责制作硬核游戏。他们结合了TeamLava的设计风格及Storm8的RPG游戏机制。这是我们进行自我改造的另一个典型事例。

2012年，我们介入了两种不同的全新游戏类型。其一为Shark Party，主要制作博彩游戏。目前旗下有《Slots》和《Poker》这两款游戏。这是我们之前从未涉入的全新风格。接着就是我之前分享的《Bubble Mania》。这款游戏再次证明我们在新风格尝试上的成功。就制作游戏方面，我们的不同之处在于，当我们决定采用这一风格来制作新游戏时，我们时刻谨记要开发出这一类别中最优秀的游戏。我想，许多试图复制他人作品的公司并不一定有我们的这种意识。他们的工作就是复制。而我们的工作是开发出最好的游戏。在制作《Bubble Mania》的时候，我们极其注重细节。我必须表扬制作出如此精良游戏的团队。这是该时期手机平台上最棒的双人射击游戏。这归功于我们的一些重要优势。我们的平台技能便于我们运用较低成本制作绝对高品质的游戏。|

你的竞争对手还抱怨……你的游戏业务发展迅猛，肯定使用了作弊手段。或者肯定利用其它国家的大批人马操纵下载量，或者是类似做法。

这是个有趣的评价。我不知道你是否看到论坛上关于此问题的回……

是的，我看到了。你的联合创始人William Siu对此问题作出了回答，是吗？

是的。我想，我们已经完美回答了这一问题。[编者注：Perry过后补充道：“我有打算快速回到自动下载程序这个问题上来。以防我的答案不够明了，我必须强调Storm8不使用任何操作下载量的程序。我们通过制作杰出的游戏，以及在拥有600万DAU的专属网络上推广游戏以提升下载量。”]

我们是历经过去几年的积累才建立了这个用户网络。每一天都有超过600万的日活跃用户体验我们的游戏。以《Bubble Mania》为例。它在三天内就累积了100多万次的下载量，而且我们并未在市场营销上投入半分资金。老实讲，如果你使用操纵下载程序，你仍需投入一些费用。而不需任何花费就能使用这种违规程序，我想没人可以做到。关键是，我们确实积极利用了我们的DAU和网络。正如William所说，如果你拥有600万的DAU，你只需让其中1%的用户对你的游戏感兴趣，你就能立刻得到6万次的安装量。

相对而言，我们的转化率更高，因为我们的用户定位较准确。他们都喜欢社交游戏。他们都对TeamLava游戏抱有期望，因为他们知道高品质游戏的重要性。他们对我们发行的任何一款游戏都抱有强烈的期望。当我们推出一款游戏后，他们就会说，太好了，我要试玩一下。大家都应该理解，这也是为何Storm8在这一领域更加出色。这都是因为我们建立起自己的用户网络。而那些没有类似网络的竞争者，可能会购买用户，使用付费获取用户渠道，他们可能至少要支付2美元/每次下载的成本来获取用户。假如游戏的每付费用户盈利（ARPPU）为1美分。如果获取一位用户需2美元，而ARPPU为1美分，那就需要用户持续体验游戏200天，你才有可能收回成本。但是大多数人是不会在一款游戏上投入200天的时间，所以我们的许多竞争者付费获取用户是个亏本的做法。而我们却可以免费获得用户。

这种用户规模足以推动游戏列居榜单前25名？我指的是你们从自己游戏中获得的推荐用户。

是的。在我们看来，这并非关乎名次。最重要的是用户是否喜爱我们的游戏。是的，我们拥有这种交叉推广能力，然而同时，我们要确保拥有正确的用户。只有这样做，制作出我们用户喜欢的游戏，才能让交叉推广更有意义。

我知道，有次你们的游戏被苹果移除了。从这次经历中你们得到了哪些教训？你们又如何同平台所有者建立牢固关系？

这是2009年的事了。过去几年，该平台进行了改革，加强了不少政策，也改变了不少政策。那次经历使我们明白，平台，尤其是苹果平台非常公平。当他们发现问题时，他们会立马公布。而当你正和他们进行电话沟通时，就可以告诉他们，好的，这个问题我们可以一起解决。这也是为何问题解决后我们的游戏又重新登上App Store。我想，现在许多平台采取的方式基本上是，它们的职责是确保生态系统的公正性。Storm8也一直坚持那个目标，因为这样对大家都有好处。

你们公司的背景很有意思……许多转向在线、社交和手机领域的新兴公司都拥有众多传统游戏行业中元老人物。有时，整个团队都是由AAA主机游戏人才组成。而你们的员工则完全不同，至少就你们创业初期来看，情况并非如此。那你对制作手机游戏的人才有何看法？

Storm8的团队就非常有能力。我们的明确定位就是制作手机游戏。举个例子。当我从Facebook转向手机时，我发现的第一件事是手机与Facebook是两个完全不同的环境。首先，你需掌握多平台的处理方法。在Facebook上，人们只关注一个平台。但是手机上，你就必须意识到有多种不同平台同时存在。我们在技术方面投入了不少精力，所以我们才能靠技术取胜。典型例子就是我们旗下的最新游戏《Monster Story》。这是我们第一款同时在iOS和Android平台上发行的游戏。是技术能力让我们实现利用不同平台的目标。从公司成立的第一起，我们就有了这样的想法。

我们建造了一个叫Dolphin的引擎，利用这个引擎我们可以利用多种平台最大化用户的体验。这与他人的跨平台引擎是完全不同的。通常，人们在提到他们拥有跨平台引擎时，这表示他们一开发出游戏，就把游戏移植到不同的平台上。我们不同意此做法，原因如下。每个平台都有自己的一套优化用户体验的工具和服务。而我们也需要利用这一特点。顺应每个平台的特点制作每款游戏，那样我们才能利用这些平台。但是我们不想向研发周期妥协，向市场投放时间妥协。我们制作这个引擎就是为了将开发进程加速至100%。使用这一引擎的开发者可以节省一半针对iOS和Android开发内容的精力。实际上，我们向多平台发布游戏的时间绝不会超过竞争对手，甚至还会省下不少时间。这就是我们获胜的法宝。我想这是一个完美的解决方案，因为它允许我们挖掘例如用户界面等方面的潜力。Android和iOS的用户界面有点不同，但是我们必须确保每一位进入游戏的用户都会觉得游戏同平台是天衣无缝地结合在一起。这个引擎有利于我们在相同的开发时间内推出适用于两个平台的游戏。

听起来HTML5这种通用型解决方案，或者混合HTML5的技术好像并不适用于你们团队。HTML5已被视为移动设备和Facebook游戏的通用标准，但从你所说的内容来看，你们似乎并不打算采用这种方法。

是的，你说对了。目前我们主要针对iOS和Android开发原生应用。我们已经试验过HTML5，我们最初在Facebook上进行尝试……如果我们打算使用HTML5，我们会利用HTML5上所有独特元素。我们的引擎实际上允许我们这样做。2011年的时候，我们已经在使用过HTML5……如果我们想研究HTML5，我们的技术完全能够支持这项行动，而且这将是独特而纯正的HTML5技术。

你似乎还没回答是否会从硬核行业、AAA游戏行业中聘请有经验的开发者……你喜欢这样做吗？

当然。我们在聘请人员时，着重聘请那些最优秀的人才，而这里的最优秀人才是指那些有学习能力的人。我们知道，目前手机领域发展迅猛，变化多端。而我们保持前沿的方法就是清楚哪些是我们需要学习的最重要知识。对于第一个问题，我的答案是肯定的。我们将会，并且也已经聘请了不少拥有AAA经验的人员，我们想他们应该具备学习能力。这是我们关心的重点。但我们并不看中你是否有10年的社交游戏工作经验，因为社交游戏问世还只是最近几年的事情。重点还是你是否具备学习能力。

我发现你们这类公司现在正处于天时地利的形势。手机游戏行业瞬息万变，如果你的小型团队能够快速运营，并在短时间内生产出一款游戏，那么这就是理想状态。实际上，我并不清楚你们的平均团队规模有多大，有多少团队？

目前，全公司总共有150名员工。平均每个月推出一款游戏。我们的研发周期从设想到制作只有2-3个月的时间。手机社交游戏需要你持续工作。我们的工作刚刚起步。我们不断使用度量指标调整游戏。这就是为何我们能够把研发周期定在2-3个月，然后推出一款游戏，不断调整，优化游戏品质。我们制作游戏的团队规模很小，且能在研发周期内完成。规模通常少于10人，一般是6-8人左右。

这就是早期主机游戏开发模式。问题是，如果这个市场也走上AAA游戏的旧路，即让50-100名员工制作高端3D图像，那该怎么办？如果市场偏爱《无尽之剑》这类高端游戏，不接受其它类型的游戏，那么你们公司会怎样？你们可有其他对策？

这确实是个好问题。我喜欢把高品质同时效性区分开。2009年的时候，我们以10名员工开始创业，那时我们一个月推出一款游戏。当然，我们公司获得了不少吸引力。如今，我们拥有150名员工，我们仍旧是一个月推出一款游戏。在员工数增加的情况下，我们却并没有加快游戏发行速度。而我们游戏品质却在加速进展。至少增加10或15倍，通过简单计算就可知道过去是10个人研发一款游戏，现在是150个人研发同款游戏。我想这是发展的正确之道。你将会看到手机游戏逐步成熟……产品价值也跟着提升，这就是我们所期望的现象。而这些都实现了。有两个元素显示我们公司的与众不同，其一是之前谈到的我们有专属网络，这样可以节省营销成本，我们不需在营销上投入大量资金。也就意味着我们可以聘请更多的人才，可以把节省下来的钱用于提升产品价值及革新手机游戏。其二，就是我们在技术上的推进。我之前谈到的Dolphin引擎允许我们在相当合理的成本及相当快速的步调下不断提升产品价值。另一部分就是我们专属的图像引擎。我们构造的图像引擎和游戏开发引擎有利于我们获得最好的图像效果。如果你看过我们最新推出的游戏《Monster Story》，它的质量是两年前、甚至一年前我们发行的游戏所无法比拟的。游戏中加入的都是先进元素，比如动画数量和帧率。

我猜，移动市场的不断扩大对你们公司极其有益。因为市场每天都会售出大量新设备。

完全正确。我们估计每天至少有170万部被激活的新设备。这也是为何我们要根据市场动态及时更新游戏。如果我们每天都不更新游戏，那么我们每天就可能失去170万潜在用户。这一点是毋庸质疑的。

对Windows8作何评价？

我们研究过Windows8。目前我们还没有针对这一系统开发游戏，但是我想Windows 8会为移动生态系统提供更宽广的发展领域。

你们是否有打算向更多不同的地区扩展？比如日本，或中国，或者其它任何地方？

我确实想过这个问题。我们在美国、西方国家以及英语国家市场运营时间最长。我们很清楚，亚洲及其它地区会比一些发达国家拥有更高的发展速度。目前我们正在研究这一方面。

那么你认为从现在起，可能一年或两年后，Storm8会处于怎样的位置？

我们确实在扩展。但是我们不止朝一方面纵向发展。实际上我们是朝三个方向。其一为风格。比如《Bubble Mania》就是我们扩展的实例……公司的宗旨就是不断地彻底的自我改造。我们不断进军新风格，从RPG到休闲游戏再到硬核游戏再到街机游戏……其二为更多平台。我们从iOS平台起步，然后转向Android平台，接着是亚马逊平台，我们也在Facebook平台上发行游戏。新平台意味着新用户。我们白手起家，三年间我们共获得600万DAU，我想我们还有许多事未做。

你觉得现在整个游戏行业的境况如何？现在人们关注不少重大问题，比如Zynga的股票行情和OnLive的破产……

我确实看过这些新闻。我想，大家都清楚手机平台是游戏行业的一个全新领域。许多公司都谈进军移动领域的计划……目前，Storm8进展良好。我们并未放慢发展速度。我们的发展速度甚至比之前的更快，我们的用户基础也在迅速增加。我们认为，没有正确利用移动平台的公司将会遭遇困境。许多公司倾尽全力地想在手机平台上获得牵引力。我们有独特的定位，我们在手机平台的目标从第一天起就未曾改变。我们有过艰难时期。我们也获得了牵引力。我们要不断前进，不断创新。我想Storm8的前景一片光明。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How Storm8 can score millions of mobile game downloads with zero marketing cost (interview)

by Dean Takahashi

Perry Tam wasn’t a seasoned game developer when he co-founded Storm8, a mobile social game developer, in March 2009. He was a Facebook platform developer who worked on payment technology, but he could see that it was turning into a real game platform. Then the iPhone came out, and Storm8 jumped on the opportunity to become a “mobile first” game company.

Now Storm8 has stolen a march on a lot of rivals, reaching more than 300 million downloads and more than 100 million users. Each day, more than 6 million people play a Storm8 game (that figure is up 20 percent from the prior quarter). And the company leads in role-playing games on iOS (Apple iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone) and Android. Its hit titles include World War, Racing Live,Pets Live, iMobsters, and Vampires Live from Storm8. It also has a second studio, Team Lava, that has created Bakery Story, Restaurant Story, City Story, Farm Story and Fashion Story. The company has quadrupled its staff in the past year to 150 people, and it did so by bootstrapping itself, with no outside investment. Some rivals have anonymously accused Storm8 of cheating in its marketing tactics, using unfair tricks such as automated bots. But Tam denies that and says the company has earned all of its users.

And while other mobile game publishers are selling out, Tam is positioning the company so that it can stay independent and jump fast on the latest trends in mobile games. The company recently launched its Bubble Mania arcade shooter game (a fresh genre for Storm8), and it hit a million downloads in just three days with zero dollars spent on marketing. We caught up with Tam in a recent interview. Here’s a transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: I wondered if you could talk about the beginning of Storm8, how you guys got together and what prompted you to form the company.

Perry Tam: We started back in March of 2009. At the time, I was working at Facebook on the payments team, building their credits system. The whole Facebook credits system was part of my work back in those days. We saw that social gaming was really taking off on the Facebook platform. Social games back in early 2009… It was basically just Mafia Wars. It was even before FarmVille happened. But we already could see that social games really worked. Games were so much more fun when you played with friends, and how these games worked, at the time, was totally new.

Also, the iPhone had just come out a short time before. They’d opened up the software development kit (SDK) and opened up the platform for people to start making apps for the App Store. We looked at the iPhone and said, wow, this is going to change how people interact with their mobile devices. This is a game-changing device. So we combined those two ideas, social games and mobile — it was a great way to bring social games to people — and we formed Storm8. We added a couple of other people, I dragged a few people from Facebook, and we formed this company. We literally started out in my living room.

Now we have 150 people. In fact, we just quadrupled in size last year, and we’re on track to double it this year. Right now we occupy half of a building, about 30,000 square feet, but we recently signed a lease, starting this October, to occupy the full 50,000 square feet of the building. There’s a lot of room for us to grow even bigger. That’s where we are. So I think you’re aware of the million-dollar day we had last year. We also announced recently that we have more than 300 million downloads across 100 million devices in our network. Most recently, with the Bubble Mania launch, we announced that we have over six million daily active users (DAU) in our network.

GamesBeat: That’s all been pretty organic, right? You’ve grown it all from the ground up.

Tam: It’s not just organic. It’s also strongly bootstrapped, as far as funding the company. We have no outside capital supporting us. Every single dollar that we spend is our own money that the company made. We haven’t done any acquisitions, so every hire that we get is organically grown.

GamesBeat: Is everybody located in the one Redwood Shores area, or do you have other offices now?

Tam: No, everyone is in one area, in this office. We don’t have other offices elsewhere. We believe that it’s very important for us to put everyone under the same roof, for multiple reasons. First and foremost, we care about our culture. If we start building offices outside here, it gets harder to communicate that culture to those teams. Second, there’s the speed of development. Our dev cycle is very short. In order for us to execute that fast, to create a high-quality game at a fast pace, we need people to be paying attention all the time. They need to be sitting next to each other. They need to share ideas. We need to solve problems as soon as possible. Having everyone under the same roof is very important to us.

GamesBeat: As you get bigger, as you expand, what are your priorities? How do you choose to expand? There’s a lot of different strategies you could pursue. A lot of your rival companies have already sold out, right? Like ngmoco, they’re part of DeNA now. Funzio was just acquired by Gree for $210 million. Zynga has bought a lot of companies as well. But you’ve deliberately chosen to stay independent here.

Tam: Our strategy is definitely to stay independent. From our perspective… Some things might make sense to grow the company faster. We’ve self-funded, we haven’t raised funding. But with this kind of structure, we have a lot of freedom. We control our own destiny. That’s a good thing in terms of growing the company for us.

GamesBeat: What about the kinds of platforms you’re making games for?

Tam: We’re constantly looking to expand on the game front. Different genres of games. We can talk about Bubble Mania in a second, which is a totally new genre of game that we’re coming to. That’s one way to expand. The other way is onto different platforms. We’ve always pushed into different platforms. For example, we came to iOS really early, back in 2009. We went to Android in 2010. That was before anyone offered a lot of competition there. We also launched with Amazon just earlier this year. That’s another platform expansion. We’re constantly looking to work on other platforms as they become a significant part of the mobile ecosystem. The one thing that I want to stress here is that we do have a fairly strict focus on mobile.

Anything that’s mobile-related, we’ll pay a lot of attention to it.

GamesBeat: Tell me more about the Amazon launch. You had a pretty good first month. How is it going now?

Tam: It’s going really well. We were a launch partner with them on the in-app purchases. We integrated our games with their in-app purchases and the first month was amazing for us. I think we made over $700,000 dollars in the first month of integration. Ever since then, we’re constantly seeing very good traction on the Amazon platform.

GamesBeat: They’ve got an event they scheduled for September 6. I wonder if they’re going to get into the phone business there…

Tam: [laughs] Yeah, I’m eager to see what they’re going to share in September. Any mobile devices that they’re creating will definitely be a win for the mobile ecosystem.

GamesBeat: Once you get really big, people like to take shots at you. You guys are almost in that category now. I could put these questions in the category of “things your competitors say about you.” One is, a lot of the games look pretty generic, I guess? They look like clone games. A lot of Storm8′s games look like clones. Do you have a response to that?

Tam: Sure. I want everyone out there to understand… We’re not a one-trick pony here. We’re actually very multitalented. I’d like to point out that when we first started in 2009, we started with the Storm8 brand, which… We made RPG games. And then in 2010 we started another brand called TeamLava, and that makes all the Story games that people really enjoy. Restaurant Story, Farm Story. And then in 2011, we opened another brand called FireMocha, which makes core games. They combine the TeamLava presentation with the Storm8 RPG game mechanics. So that’s again another example of us reinventing ourselves.

In 2012, we’ve come up with two different new genres that we’re stepping into. One is called Shark Party, which holds our casino games. We have two games right now underneath that brand.

One is Slots and the other is Poker. That’s a totally new genre for us. It’s not something that we’ve done before, but we’re stepping into that. And then most recently is this Bubble Mania game that we shared with you early on. That, again, proved to everyone that we can consistently step into new genres and we can really make use of that. The way that I think we’re different, in terms of making those games, is when we decide to go into a genre, when we decide to make a new game, we always keep in mind that we want to make the best game in that category. I think a lot of companies out there that try to clone other people’s games, they don’t have that in mind. Their job is just to clone. For us, our job is to make it the best in that category. When we made Bubble Mania, we put a lot of attention into the details. I have to give a lot of praise to the team for making it so polished. It’s the best bubble-shooting game on mobile, period. That contributed a lot to its success, on top of every other important asset that we have. Our platform technology allows us to create games of a pretty high quality at a much lower cost.

GamesBeat: Another category where competitors complain about you is… Your games grow so fast that you much be using bots. Or you must be promoting them with armies of people in other countries or something like that.

Tam: [laughs] Right. It’s a very interesting comment there. I don’t know if you’re aware that there was a question on the forums that asked about that…

GamesBeat: Yeah, I saw that. [Your co-founder] William [Siu] put up an answer to that, right?

Tam: Exactly. I think we’ve done a great job of answering that question. [Editor's note: Perry added later, "I did want to quickly come back to your question about bots. In case my answer wasn't clear, Storm8 doesn't use bots and never has. We drive downloads as fast as we do by building great games and marketing them through our proprietary network of 6M+ daily active users (DAU).]

Basically, over the years we’ve built up this network of users. More than six million daily active users playing all our games, every single day. I’d point to Bubble Mania. We announced that we’ve accumulated over one million downloads in three days, and we’ve done that with zero marketing dollars. To be honest, if you use bots, you still have to spend some money on it.

We haven’t spent any. That kicks the bot thing out of the picture. Nobody can do that. The key thing here is, we really leverage our DAU, our network, actively. As William pointed out, if you have six million DAU, you need only one percent of them to get interested in the game, and you’ve got 60,000 installs right away.

Our conversion rate is much better than that, because our users are very targeted. They all love social games. They have a certain expectation when it comes to TeamLava games, because we’ve trained them that high-quality games really matter. They have high expectations for every game we release. When we put a game in front of them, they say, great, I’ll try it out. That’s very important for everyone to understand. It’s the reason why Storm8 is doing better in this space. It’s because we’ve built up this network. To give some more color to that… If a competitor, who does not have this network, would want to buy those users, using paid user acquisition, what it boils down to is that it takes at least, maybe two dollars, per download to buy those. Let’s say the game’s ARPPU is one cent. If it takes you two dollars to get a user and the (average revenue per paying user) ARPPU is one cent, you need 200 days to recoup that cost, assuming that the user even stays that long. Most people don’t stay for 200 days, so it’s a losing proposition for a lot of our competitors to do user acquisition. We just get it for free.

GamesBeat: That amount of users is enough to push a game into the top 25, I suppose? The number of referral users you get from your own games.

Tam: Yeah. From our perspective, it’s not about the ranking. It’s about whether our users really like the game. Yes, we have this cross-promotional marketing power, but at the same time, we pay a lot of attention to make sure that we have the right users for the game. By doing that, by creating games we think our users will like… It makes more sense as far as cross-promoting with them.

GamesBeat: I know there was a time a while ago when your games were taken down by Apple. Is there some lesson you drew out of that experience, as far as how you need to have a strong relationship with the platform owner?

Tam: That was the really early days, going back to 2009. Over the years, as the platform’s evolved, a lot of policies have solidified, and policies have changed over time. From that experience, we learned that the platform, specifically Apple, is actually very fair. When they see a problem, they let people know. As soon as it comes up you’re on the phone with them.

You let them know, okay, here’s the problem, we can fix it together, and we do it. That’s why our games went back to the App Store right after the problem was resolved. I think a lot of platforms nowadays take an approach where, basically, their job is to maintain the integrity of the ecosystem. Storm8 is certainly aligned with that goal, because that’s the best for everyone.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting that your background… A lot of the startups that have moved into the online, social, and mobile space have a lot of game industry veterans. Sometimes the whole team is coming from the triple-A console game market. You guys are a contrast to that, at least as far as how you started. How do you feel about the talent that can make mobile games?

Tam: The team at Storm8 is a very talented one. We’re well-positioned for making mobile games. Let me give you an example. When I came from Facebook to mobile, the first thing I noticed is that mobile is totally different from the Facebook environment. First off, you have this multiplatform approach. On Facebook, everyone was very focused on the one platform. On mobile, you have to be aware of all the different platforms at the same time. We invested a lot into the technology, so that we were able to take advantage of that. A great example of that is the newest game that we launched, Monster Story. It launched a week, two weeks ago? This is the first game we released the same day on both iOS and Android. The way we make that happen is we invest heavily in the technology, so we can take advantage of the different platforms. We’ve had that mentality since day one.

We’ve built this engine, called the Dolphin engine, that allows us to take advantage of the different platforms and maximize the user experience here. It’s different from other people’s cross-platform engines. Oftentimes, when people say they have a cross-platform engine, what they mean is that they only write the game once and then they can port to different platforms. We don’t agree with that, and here’s the reason. Each platform has its unique offerings that can totally enhance the user experience for that platform. We don’t want to limit ourselves by not tapping into that. Our approach is different here. We said, for each platform, we’re going to build natively for each one, so we can take advantage of them. But we don’t want to compromise on the development cycle. We don’t want to compromise on the time to market. What we do is, we made the engine such that it can accelerate each development process by 100 percent. For someone who wants to build on this engine, it’s only going to take you half as long to do it for iOS and half as long to do it for Android. In combination, we’re actually on par or even gaining time when we want to launch on multiple platforms, compared to our competitors. That’s how we achieve that. I think it’s a perfect solution, because it allows us to tap… For example, the user interface. Android and iOS have slightly different offerings for the user interface, and we want to make sure that the user who comes to the game feels it fits very seamlessly with their platform. We’ve built this engine so we can do that on both platforms in the same amount of development time.

GamesBeat: It sounds like HTML 5 as a universal solution isn’t going to work for you guys. Or something that’s a hybrid of HTML 5. It’s been proposed as a universal format for games on mobile devices or Facebook, but it sounds like, from what you just said, that that’s probably not an approach you’re going to take.

Tam: No, you’re right. Right now we do native development for iOS and native development for Android. We’ve experimented with HTML 5. We actually worked on it with Facebook initially… If we want to do HTML 5 we’ll do it natively. We’ll take advantage of all the good things that are unique to HTML 5. Our engine actually allows us to do that. We’ve done that with some of our games… I think it was in 2011 we did that. If we want to go into HTML 5 our technology totally allows that, and it will be unique and native to HTML 5.

GamesBeat: You may have missed one part of the question about whether you like to hire seasoned game developers from the core, triple-A industry… Do you like to do that?

Tam: Sure. When we hire people, we have a very strong focus on hiring the best talent, and the best talent for us will be someone who can learn. One thing we’ve learned so far in the mobile space is that it moves so fast. It changes very quickly. The only way to stay on top is knowing that the most important knowledge that comes with you is your ability to learn. My answer to your earlier question is yes, we will hire and we have hired people who come from triple-A experience, with the thinking that they have the capability to learn. That’s what we care about. It’s not really about whether you have 10 years of experience in social games, because nobody has 10 years of experience in social games. What matters is whether they can learn.

GamesBeat: I can see the circumstances under which your kind of company is one of the best to have. The mobile game industry changes quickly, and if you have to have small teams that move fast and get a game out in a very short period of time, then that is ideal. I don’t know what your average is and how big your team sizes are. Actually, what are those?

Tam: Right now, in total, the whole company has 150 people. Right now we’re averaging one game a month. I’d say the dev cycle for us is between two and three months, from conception to shipping the game. The one thing you need in mobile social games is… Our job doesn’t stop after launch. Our job just gets started. We’re constantly using metrics to tune the game. We constantly push out more content. We keep adding new features after launch. That’s why we’re able to have a dev cycle of a two to three months to launch a game, and then constantly tune it and make it better. The team size for making a game in that amount of time is actually very small. Usually it’s less than 10 people. I’d say it hovers around six to eight.

GamesBeat: That’s the way it was in the early days of the console games. The question is, what happens if the market moves toward the direction that the triple-A games moved, where they have 50 or 100 people doing very high-end 3D graphics? If the market wants games like Infinity Blade, and will accept nothing less than that, what happens then for your kind of company? How do you compete?

Tam: That’s a really good question. I like to separate out the high quality and the timeliness. Back in the day, 2009, when we first started with less than 10 people, we were launching one game a month. We certainly gained some traction there. Today, we have 150 people and we’re still launching one game a month. We have more people, but we’re not launching faster. Our quality has stepped up tremendously. At least 10, 15 times, if you just do the simple math of 10 people doing one game then and 150 people doing one game now. I think that’s the right way to go. You’ll see mobile gaming, as it matures… The production values are going to keep pushing up, and that’s what we’re about to do. That’s definitely happening. Two things that makes us so unique and different, though… The first thing is, we have this network that I talk about. What it allows us to do is, we save money on the marketing front, because we don’t have to put that much into marketing. That means we can hire more talented people. We can put all that money we saved on marketing into production values and innovating with mobile gaming.

That’s what’s happening. Second, we push on the technology. The Dolphin engine that I talk about is one of many things we’ve built here that will allow us to constantly push the production values up at a fairly decent cost, and also at a fairly rapid pace. Part of it is the graphics engine. It’s totally proprietary, but you can compare it to the Cocos2d engine out there. We built a graphics engine and a game development engine to help us keep getting better and better graphics. If you look at the latest game we have, Monster Story, the quality in there is just day and night compared to the games we launched two years ago, or even a year ago. The number of animations, the frame rate, all that stuff is advancing.

GamesBeat: I guess the good thing is that the market is getting bigger all the time. A lot more devices are being sold every day.

Tam: Definitely. We estimate at least 1.7 million new devices are activated every day. That’s why we keep pushing on getting our games to the market as soon as possible. Every day we don’t push the game out, we lose 1.7 million potential customers. That’s absolutely true.

GamesBeat: How do you feel about Windows 8?

Tam: We’ve taken a look into it. Right now we’re not developing for it, but I think it has a lot to offer to the mobile ecosystem.

GamesBeat: And what about expanding more into different territories? Japan or China or wherever else?

Tam: It’s definitely on our minds. For the longest time, we’ve been dominating in the U.S. and the western world. English-speaking countries. We certainly understand that the Asian world and other countries have a higher growth rate than some more developed countries. We’re currently working on it.

GamesBeat: Where do you see Storm8 in, maybe, a year or two from now?

Tam: We’re definitely expanding. We’re not just expanding on one vertical. We’re actually expanding on at least three different verticals. One is genres. We’re expanding with Bubble Mania… This company’s DNA is always reinventing itself. We’re constantly stepping into new genres, from RPGs to casual to core to arcade… The second vertical is more platforms. We started with iOS, then we moved to Android, we’re moving to Amazon, we’re on Facebook as well. Another platform is another audience. We’ve built the network from zero to six million plus in three years, and I think there’s still a lot for us to do.

GamesBeat: How do you feel about the state of the whole game industry right now? There’s a lot of attention focused on some big problems, like Zynga’s stock price and OnLive’s collapse…

Tam: I’ve certainly seen a lot of news stories about those. I think everyone can see that mobile is the new frontier for gaming. A lot of companies talk about how they’re expanding to mobile… Right now, at Storm8 we’re seeing a lot of growth. We’re not slowing down. We’re hiring even faster than we used to be, and our user base is growing very rapidly. The story here is, anyone who doesn’t get mobile right is going to suffer. A lot of companies are trying their best to gain traction on mobile. We’re in a unique position where our focus was on mobile since day one. We have the first hard part out of the way. We have that traction already. We can keep moving, keep innovating. I think the future’s very bright for Storm8.（source:venturebeat）