In 2012, Pocket Gems was thriving as a leading mobile game developer. We had found early success as the creator of the casual simulation category with Tap Zoo and Tap Pet Hotel, and had continued to grow over the years with titles like Animal Voyage: Island Adventure and Tap Paradise Cove. The company was doing well financially, our players were happy and our team liked the games we were making — generally everything was going well. That’s when we decided to shift our strategy so we could work on something entirely new.
That year, we went back to our startup roots to try and be a category creator for two new areas: mobile storytelling and synchronous games in 3D worlds. This was a hard choice as Pocket Gems was a leading developer of 2012 (Tap Pet Hotel had recently been a top grossing game in 85 countries), but it led to two of the most successful products in our history: Episode and War Dragons. While the result has been great, it wasn’t an easy path. Transitions are difficult and there are almost no cases in our industry of a company successfully changing to an entirely new category of products.
Looking back on this experience, it is now clear that most efforts like this fail because they don’t generate deep-rooted change that includes all levels of the internal team AND external constituents like customers and investors. A few steps to our success in creating deep-rooted change included broad creative ownership, baking in financial runway and flexibility, and finding complementary talent.
Why change?
There were some important reasons to consider a transition. We saw warning signs with our player community. Some of our players told us that they were starting to play other games with new types of gameplay mechanics and were losing interest in our games. This was also reflected in the data where we saw metrics that had historically always risen, like average revenue per daily active user, start to plateau. There was also major creative energy internally to try and make something new again. As a pioneering team, we’re inspired to push the boundaries of what’s possible on mobile, so the idea of taking on a new category was appealing to us.
While the new direction resonated with the leadership of the company, we knew we had to get buy-in from the whole team before we moved forward. I believe the reason why change almost always fails is because it’s too shallow, so we made it the No. 1 priority to sell the new vision to the team. I imagined we were a new company trying to recruit everyone again for the first time, getting input and helping others see how they would fit in the company’s new direction. We knew this would take time, so we started as soon as we had a vision that we believed in. Our goal was to have people asking “What took so long?” when the transition eventually happened.
Broad creative ownership
Games is a creative business, so for the change to be deep-rooted, we had to allow the creative leadership of Pocket Gems to take ownership of the new direction. Our company is set up in an unusual way where everyone is…