On the eve of Casual Connect Kiev, we talked with John Holland, COO of Big Fish, one of the largest “fish” in the casual and now mobile games industry.
Which of your mobile games would you call the most successful at the moment?
Our games regularly occupy the top lines of the top box office applications both in the Games category and among all categories.
However, at the moment we consider Big Fish Casino to be the most successful game. It still remains the leading mobile social game in the iTunes App Store and does not leave the top box office hits for both iPhone and iPad.
What are you planning to do next? Will you continue publishing traditional casual games on mobile platforms or focus on gambling?
We have just launched free-to-play games on our portal with PC and Mac titles, so now more than 14 million unique monthly players will be able to play them online on a computer or download them to PC and Mac.
Thus, Big Fish continues to increase the number of f2p projects, while not forgetting about the development of the casual games market on mobile platforms, in the Big Fish Unlimited cloud, as well as on PC and Mac.
There is a lot of talk about the official opening of the Windows Store (Win8). Will your games be present there and what do you think about the prospects of this market?
We are sure that there will be a lot of different kinds of applications for Windows 8, and applications of really high quality.
It suits us, because we have a large portfolio of high-quality games. Therefore, we are going to work actively with Microsoft. It was recently announced that the first Big Fish game on Windows 8 will be a very successful box office title Fairway Solitaire. Now there are other games in development for Win8.
Tell us which app stores do you think are promising (other than the App Store, Google Play and Windows Store)?
In the Android app market, in addition to the Google Play store, we are also seeing good results on the Amazon Appstore.
You work closely with developers from Russia and Ukraine, come to Russian-language conferences. Why haven’t you opened an office here yet?
There are no concrete plans in this regard yet, but time will tell.
Website Bigfishgames.com It is the world’s largest portal for the distribution of casual downloadable games. Can you say that this market has stopped growing?
Everything is still fine with the casual games market on PC and Mac.
We have 14 million unique visitors per month on our site, 2 billion games have already been downloaded in total. This year we have seen growth on all our portals (all languages) – growth that we have been seeing every year for the past 10 years.
Who do you think is stronger in terms of influence on the gaming industry: Apple with Facebook or Google?
Each side has its own advantages.
How come Big Fish doesn’t have social games?
Big Fish has the most successful social gambling game for mobile platforms to date, and this is a synchronous type of game.
In addition, we have just launched its online version on www.bigfishgames.com and we expect it to become just as popular on PC and Mac.
Games that are not social are often called social games, in the sense that they do not imply real-time interaction between players. Players do something, then close the game and only then come back to see if their friends have entered the project. This is the main difference of Big Fish Casino, which allows people to play with each other synchronously, in real time.