Comstock's magazine 1217 - December 2017 | Page 66

n GAMING
SURVIVAL MODE
"The only way to keep
developer talent in
Sacramento is either
by luring outside major
companies to the area, or
growing an industry from
the ground up through
entrepreneurship."
— Nathan Allshouse, president & CEO, Square One Clubs
But a stable workforce doesn’t make a company invincible.
5th Planet Games emerged at the time when social
network games like "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars" were
dominating Facebook. Winkler’s first game, "Dawn of the
Dragons," a multiplayer fantasy role-playing game, was part
of that same social wave. But a few years later, the tides had
shifted. In 2013, projections for social games weren’t as high
as expected, with future trends pointing towards mobile
games.
Winkler had to reconfigure the entire focus of the com-
pany. The biggest challenge moving from social to mobile
games was around marketing. On sites like Facebook, it
was easier and less expensive to attract users, especially if
games went viral, Winkler says. He used platforms like Kon-
gregate to handle all the marketing and user acquisition.
But it became more expensive to market on mobile devices,
making it difficult for indie developers to survive, let alone
get noticed.
Around this same time, 5th Planet Games pulled the plug
on a big game before it was released. Something about the
game "Drift Realm" — an RPG set in an alternate universe
— wasn’t clicking, Winkler recalls. The move, he says, cost
the company a couple hundred thousand dollars. Eventu-
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comstocksmag.com | December 2017