Aadil Mamujee

I started working in the games industry in 2010 and joined Pocket Gems as the first product manager to help us create free to play gaming as a new category on mobile. Mobile phones are personalized, portable computers that are carried around everywhere by people, and it made sense to me that for many people in the world, this would be their primary gaming device.

It was a really interesting time to be in mobile games; Apple had just launched in-app purchases, app discovery/advertising was nascent, and almost all causal developers were focused on Facebook/Web vs. Mobile.  In 2010, for some additional perspective, King.com (Candy Crush) which now has an annual revenue of >$2BN (95% mobile) had zero mobile revenues and Supercell (Hay Day and Clash of Clans), which is now valued at >$3BN, did not even exist.

In 2010, in order to succeed we had to create products that had mass appeal and were first to market. People played our games because they were casual and fun at a time where few free to play games existed on mobile. Our design was simple, and often inelegant, and we did an excellent job with merchandising and tactics but often lacked insight into player behavior beyond what our (fairly sophisticated) analytics told us. We lacked empathy for our players and designed products which were inauthentic to us, and over the long term I think this became evident to our players as well.

We have since realized that we will never be a creator of really great products and games if we continue to develop them in this manner. I was responsible for the design and development of one of the simulation games in our last cohort, Animal Voyage, which will end up making a small profit but we don’t consider it a success because we didn’t create a lasting franchise. I was never a player of sim games, and struggled to get into the mindset of the player. It resulted in a product that was inelegantly designed, with too many disjointed mechanics and a lack of attention to player experience. Over time, our players realized this and long term retention was poor despite really strong early metrics (which we used to determine the game’s viability). In the end, lack of empathy for our players and lack of focus on making the game really fun (measured by long term retention) led to the downfall of the product. 

I’m now working on a new title, and the emotions I experience while playing the game remind me of games that I loved growing up. I’m excited to tell my friends about it, I’m excited for our daily throwdowns and I’m really excited about how energetic our team is about the product and the vision. I have come to the realisation that to even have a shot at creating something great you have to have great passion for the product, care greatly for your players and make design decisions that are consistent with your mission and objectives. I have also realized how important it is that your team cares about the product, is deeply invested in the outcome, and makes every decision, no matter how small, with the player in mind. I think that even a team with all the right skills and talents needs this mindset to be able to create something amazing, and I’m personally really excited to be developing new games with this philosophy.

I hope it leads to a game that has many loyal fans and becomes a lasting franchise but even if it does not, we’ll feel much better about the path because it at least gives us a shot at achieving this goal.