If you haven’t paid attention, there’s a surprisingly strong genre of browser-based games dubbed .io games. The name comes from the .io extension files, and it includes big hits like Miniclip’s Agar.io.
Agar.io debuted in April 2015, developed by a single Brazilian developer Matheus Valadares. It was a simple browser-based game where you play as a single-cell animal, moving around a kind of graph paper environment. You swallow other cells and creatures, and enable yourself to grow.
The casual game came to Miniclip’s attention, and within a week, everybody in the company was playing it, said Jamie Cason, executive producer at Miniclip, in a talk at Casual Connect Europe in Berlin. Within a week, the team met Valadares in Lisbon, Portugal, and acquired the publishing rights for the title.
Miniclip, founded in 2001, has about 200 million monthly active users. It releases about 100 games a year. But the company knew it had something special with Agar.io. A few weeks after that, YouTube sensation PewDiePie, who has tens of millions of followers, picked it up and started making a series of funny videos playing the game.
“At that point, it was rocket fuel,” Cason said. “.io games tend to be super accessible. Wherever you are, you can find the time to play the game.”
He added, “There’s also something social about them. Something that makes them take off in a viral way. There was something cultural, with a punky feel that fit with Internet memes. It…