Lately I’ve been depressed by the number of arguments I’ve witnessed about the US Affordable Care Act that revolved around anecdotes as opposed to facts. “My buddy Joe’s premiums doubled because of this stupid law!” “Oh yeah? My cousin Susan was dying of cancer and couldn’t get insurance, until this law saved her life!” I expect this kind of thing from politicians (“Let me tell you about Mary Sue of South Dakota…”) but not from my friends and family. How about we break down a few simple stats instead:

A large, recent Gallup poll that asked respondents: “are you satisfied with the availability of quality healthcare in your city or area” and “do you have confidence in your national healthcare system” pegged the United States below countries like the UK, France, Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and Iceland *on both questions.* Interestingly, even when the US tied or slightly edged out countries on the “availability” question, we fall way behind other countries on the “confidence” question… folks in Turkey and Mexico have more confidence in their medical system than we Americans do.

We’re also below most of our peer nations when it comes to life expectancy. Of course there are many factors that influence life expectancy, but it seems fair to say that if socialized medicine were a disaster, you’d expect to see some sort of impact on this metric. (Or perhaps French lifestyle and dietary habits are so utterly superior to ours that their life expectancy is greater in spite of their terrible healthcare system… that they nevertheless appreciate more than we Americans appreciate ours?) The USA isn’t used to seeing itself rated below Qatar, Costa Rica, Greece, Slovenia, or Chile on too many metrics, and on this one in particular, we really should be outraged.

Then of course, there’s the simple fact that we pay radically more for various medical services than anybody else. Not 10% more. Not 50% more. Not 200% more. How about 10x more for, as just one example, bypass surgery?

This doesn’t mean the ACA will solve all our problems. Not by a long-shot. But if your argument against it is “socialized medicine just can’t (or shouldn’t) work” you are metaphorically sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “NAH NAH NAH NAH” like a small child.

The ACA website rollout is totally fubarred. That sucks. (Doesn’t help that the deployment team was contending with massive obstructionism at the state and federal level by opponents of the law, but hey, let’s ignore that for the moment.) Pretty much every big project the government has tackled in recent memory has started out all screwed up. If we terminated every major infrastructure project at the first sign of serious problems, there would quite literally be no new major highways and all our old bridges would crumble to dust (spoken as a former resident of Boston during the Big Dig and current resident of Seattle during the 520 rebuilding project.)

Most Americans agree that government doesn’t tend to be the most competent of institutions. But we also really like having police to guard our homes, armies to defend our borders, inspectors to safeguard our food and CDC scientists to safeguard us from the outbreak of virulent diseases. I’m not sure what separates those things from “doctors to keep us healthy,” other than our own stubborn insistence that healthcare is somehow a privilege, not a right.

An important thing to bear in mind, if you’re not familiar with our company, is that we are primarily focused on developing F2P games that we hope to maintain and evolve for years to come. We haven’t been trying to secure a slot on XBLA and we haven’t been trying to sell boxed product. We view everything through the lens of “will this partnership enable us to make a better game, to learn important lessons and to eventually become more independent.”

So, that said: I’ve met a few really interesting publishers in the past couple years; folks who seems smart, motivated and knowledgeable about things that I wish I knew more about. We haven’t done any deals. Why? It always comes down to three issues:

Issue #1: Paid user acquisition

One of the major reasons why many F2P game developers want to work with publishers is because they are terrified by the skyrocketing costs of user acquisition on Web and mobile platforms. They figure, “I don’t know how to do this user acquisition thing and I couldn’t afford it even if I did, so I need a publisher.”

It makes sense, in theory. But one of the major problems with publishing arrangements for F2P games is that by their very nature, they can actually make user acquisition more challenging, not less, by raising the bar for what is a profitable user acquisition. Say for example that the developer of FunFunGame agrees to a 50/50 revenue share with ThatPublisher.  And let’s say that the estimated lifetime value of an average player of FunFunGame is $5 after distribution fees have already been accounted for, which means that the developer and publisher will each earn $2.50 per player on average.

What this implies is that, not including ongoing operational costs (which can be substantial for F2P games), ThatPublisher can afford to spend up to $2.50 to acquire a user for FunFunGame without losing money. But if the developer of FunFunGame had self-published and kept 100% of the revenue from the game, they could afford to spend up to $5 to acquire a user.

By making a 50/50 agreement with ThatPublisher, the developer of FunFunGame has literally doubled the performance bar it will need to reach in order to make its game very successful.

And again, this is predicated on the typical 50/50 revshare that many publishers prefer.  The more the ratio shifts in favor of the developer, the more unappealing paid user acquisition becomes for ThatPublisher. It is the ultimate catch-22… you can effectively negotiate yourself into a situation where your game becomes unmarketable.

Issue #2: Relationship with the customer

The second major issue is that, by signing a publishing deal, the developer of FunFunGame will most likely give up much, if not all, of its relationship with the customer. Building a strong, direct relationship with players is one of the very few things that developers can do in order to increase the odds of success for their future games and, relatedly, to decrease the cost of user acquisition in the future.

A smart publisher understands this. They are not simply interested in the revenue from FunFunGame; they want a long-term relationship with its players. ThatPublisher will typically claim exclusive ownership over the players’ contact info and all channels of communication associated with players. And many indie developers will simply let that slide because they’re much more worried about issues like IP ownership. But ultimately, something like this could be just as important to a developer’s future.

Issue #3: Platform migration

The third and final major issue is that the gaming landscape is fractured, and it is increasingly impractical to focus all of your efforts on a single platform. Which means that if you’re working with ThatPublisher, you either need to work with them (and cut them in) on every platform – even if you don’t need their help on certain platforms – or you need to figure out what you’re going to do when, for example, players of FunFunGame on Steam (where you self-publish) migrate to FunFunGame on mobile (where you work with ThatPublisher). The latter can be super messy; odds are you’ll simply choose to work with ThatPublisher on every platform, even if you didn’t initially want to.

Of course, you could solve for this problem by simply preventing cross-platform player migration. But that will just irritate players if there isn’t an obvious good technical or design reason for it. And remember, if they can’t play your game when and where they want to, they’ll just play someone else’s game.

Given these issues, should you ever work with a publisher?

This is a very difficult question to answer. In truth, I’m largely skeptical of publishers – not because I think they’re all inherently bad folks, but as I’ve explained, because I think they are a relatively expensive funding source. There are a variety of ways for a mature indie to secure development dollars, most of which do not suffer from the issues I previously noted.

Sometimes it’s worth paying the price for a good publisher. If you feel poorly equipped to tackle the business side of game development in general, or if you feel ignorant about the platforms or business models that your game will depend on, then a publisher can be not only a source of funding but also a teacher and helping hand.

There is a caveat to this. In my very limited experience, and in the experience of several indies I’ve spoken with, most publishers are not good at extrapolating broadly generalizable lessons from their specific experiences. In other words, publishers who have been successful with F2P real-time strategy games tend to be very good at publishing more very similar F2P real-time strategy games. They tend to be not-so-good at publishing other things.

F2P is not a simple list of best practices that, when applied to any game, instantly result in fame and fortune. Monetization and retention tactics that work well in one title will fail in another. A given game will thrive on one platform but flop on another. F2P game development (heck, game development in general) is hard. You better believe that if anyone had the magic formula for cranking out successful games, they wouldn’t be publishing your game. They’d be making their own and keeping 100% of the revenue.

So if you’re making something unusual, I think you need to be especially skeptical about working with most publishers. Their “playbook” (a term made infamous by Zynga) is not likely to be a perfect fit for your game, and there’s a good chance they’ll be stumped and disheartened when that turns out to be the case.

But if you’re making something that is clearly in the wheelhouse of a given publisher, and if you are not prepared to spend the next several years growing up and learning some (occasionally painful) lessons about the F2P space, a publishing deal might be the right thing for you. I’ve been impressed with some of the folks at Kongregate and Tilting Point; they represent a new breed of publishers that understand how the publishing model needs to fundamentally evolve. (Spry Fox is not in a publishing relationship with either Kongregate or Tilting Point and we have no plans to be. I share their names mainly because people at both of those companies have impressed me with their knowledge and attitudes and have freely given me some helpful advice in the past.)

And if you’re like us… well, it’s a bumpy ride, but I think it’s worth riding solo when you can.

One of the most frustrating things a game developer will ever hear is “that [PERCEIVED GENRE] game isn’t worth [PRICE]—I can get [OTHER GAME] for [LOWER PRICE].”

It’s frustrating for a whole bunch of reasons. Your game might not be very similar to the games to which it is being compared, or might offer more content or replayability. Heck, you might simply think your game is “better” and deserves a higher price. But it doesn’t matter. The comparisons are being made and now you’re getting 2-star reviews calling your game good but your company “greedy.”

If that sounds familiar, congratulations: You are part of the very large and growing club of developers who underestimated the power of relativity. No, not E=MC2. I’m talking about the fundamental human tendency to compare everything in our lives to something else we’re familiar with. An organic apple seems ludicrously overpriced to you at $1.99 because conventional apples sell for $0.79, but that same apple would have seemed cheap if your grocery store only carried the organic variety and if organic mangos appeared nearby for $5.99 each. It’s all relative.

Psychologists tell us that something we can do to increase our happiness in life is to own the nicest house in our neighborhood. This is the exact opposite of what many financial advisors will tell you, but the psychologists are right—if you own the nicest house in your neighborhood, you’ll rarely feel jealous of your neighbors or dissatisfied with your lot in life (unless, of course, you spend a bunch of time driving around wealthier neighborhoods).

A huge part of traditional retail marketing is dedicated to countering and exploiting this fundamental human tendency. Retailers very carefully pick what products they sell beside each other. And they attempt to reel you into their stores with advertisements showing a product that you are likely to be familiar with, for a price you’re likely to perceive as cheap, while then upselling you in person on products (with high margins) that you’re less familiar with. (Who the heck knows what an 18k gold necklace in that shape, containing that stone, by that designer should actually be worth?)

Triple Town: The puzzle game that wished it wasn’t

So, to bring this back to game development: you’re making a game. Odds are, whether you like it or not, it’s going to be compared to some other game. And when that comparison is made, you will live the consequences. In the mobile world, more often than not, the consequences are rather predictable: you’re going to have to sell your game for somewhere between $0.99 and $2.99 or risk being perceived as “too expensive.”

You can try to fight this the way we did in Triple Town’s mobile edition. We believed that we had created something special, but we knew that nobody would pay what we believed was “fair” for unlimited turns. (Tricky word, “fair.” Your definition probably isn’t the same as mine.) So we gave people a limited number of free turns in Triple Town every day, with the hope that eventually the quality of the game would win over even the most jaded $0.99 shopper. It kinda worked. We started out with Unlimited Turns at $6.99 and consumers absolutely lost their minds with rage. How dare we charge so much?!? So we ratcheted that back to $3.99 and it seemed to work. We still get the occasional complaint, but in general we convert free players to paying users at a higher rate than most casual games achieve, and we do it at a price we feel comfortable with.

With all that said, what I want you to understand is that we did it wrong in Triple Town. Yes, even though we have a higher conversion rate than most traditional puzzle games.

We did it wrong precisely because we allowed ourselves to be compared to “most traditional puzzle games”; in other words, games that consumers are no longer willing to pay more than $0.99 for, with rare exception. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about spending the time to create something original and beautiful in a market that values it so little.

Realm of the Mad God: the anti-reference

Now take a moment and compare our experience with Triple Town to our experience with Realm of the Mad God. For starters, RotMG was generally resistant to comparison. What is an 8-bit bullet hell shooter MMO featuring permadeath and 80-man raids (in Flash!) similar to, exactly? More importantly, the things we sold within RotMG aren’t easily compared to other products. What, exactly, is a “character slot” in this context worth? What’s more inventory space worth? What’s a health potion worth?

Well, I’ll tell you: It’s worth what you’re willing to pay for it. No more, no less. But at least that number is derived from your intrinsic interest in playing RotMG (relative to any other game) and your personal opinion of a given item’s likely value to you. It is not derived from the arbitrary fact that Angry Birds sells for $0.99, and therefore your game should, too. What a concept… being paid in accordance with how much people like your game!

In other words, free-to-play games—especially original f2p games that defy comparison—have an opportunity to lift the goods that you are selling off the “supermarket shelf” and into a context that does not encourage such crude comparison shopping.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean “make a f2p game and you can charge whatever you want for IAP.” The perfect example of this is, again, Triple Town. Unlimited Turns are an in-app purchase that is nevertheless perceived by consumers as an upgrade to the “paid version.” Consequently, the game remains on the supermarket shelf and only manages to achieve a slightly higher sale price thanks to how extremely engaging and replayable it is. If you really want to break free of the supermarket, your IAP can’t simply be a thinly-veiled upsell to the full version of the game. It has to be different.

Relativity can help, too

Breaking free of unhelpful comparisons is just one side of this coin. The other side, of course, is to leverage the helpful comparisons. For example, in one of our recent games, Highgrounds, we generate essentially all of our revenue by selling booster packs of non-consumable playable units. Highgrounds has been described as “Magic: the Gathering without cards” and even though there are substantial differences between the games, we like that description so much that we’ve wholly embraced it.

The reason this comparison is helpful to us is that MtG has a very well understood revenue model. There are millions of people out there who appreciate the fundamental promise of the game: you can spend very little (or in our case, zero) and still have fun and be competitive, or you can spend a lot to really flesh out your library and enjoy a much greater diversity of strategic options. You don’t “pay to win,” you “pay to play differently.” Players really seem to respond well to this.

I should emphasize that our avoidance of “pay to win” is only part of the equation for Spry Fox. When the inevitable angry player complains about our business model in our forums, our fans often spring to our defense by invoking the long and respected history of games like MtG that have used booster packs as their revenue system. Even some trolls will grudgingly admit that they “get it” even if they “don’t like it.” That’s the benefit of comparing ourselves to a positive reference point as opposed to a negative one.

Markets matter

It’s worth noting that even if you’re planning to develop a traditional, non-f2p game, in a traditional genre, with all the traditional trappings, you can still make decisions that impact how your game will be perceived and compared. Take a game like Faster Than Light (FTL)—one of my favorite indie releases in the past few years.

If FTL had first launched on mobile phones at the exact same quality level and with an appropriate UI, it would have been unlikely to sustain a higher than $2.99 price point, and even that is questionable for an indie game of this scope nowadays. And once FTL had launched on mobile phones, it may have been branded as a mobile phone game and therefore somehow “not worthy” of a higher price without substantial expansion or improvement. But instead the game launched elsewhere, and was sold for prices as high as $10 with regular discounts to $5 on platforms like Steam.

If you ignore relativity, it doesn’t make any sense. Why should a game be worth several times more money just because it launches on Steam before it launches on mobile phones? Of course, you can’t ignore relativity, because your prospective customers certainly won’t.

If only I was selling coffee

It’s easy to feel bitter when someone holding a $4 latte says that your $2 game is overpriced. Unfortunately, bitterness won’t help you sell games, and there’s something to be learned from the fact that Starbucks can sell coffee for $4, or that Evian can sell bottled water for $3. These companies have marketing machines that spend millions of dollars convincing us to disassociate their products from cheaper and/or less-refined substitutes.

Their marketers are pushing a message: “you can justify spending a fortune on this water because we shipped it to you from a mountain spring in Switzerland.” And: “You can pay $4 for this cup of coffee because not only is it tastier, but you will enjoy the experience of drinking it in our comfortable and trendy café.” In other words, 7-11 sells you coffee; Starbucks sells you coffee++ and strongly suggests that you cannot compare the two.

Wrapping up

The bottom line is this: You are not purely at the mercy of the market. Every choice you make, from your game’s genre, to your game’s business model, to your game’s launch platform will have an impact on how your game is perceived and to what your game is compared.

You are the first person to describe your game to the public; you decide what, if anything, you’ll liken it to. You control the context of your in-game purchases, if there are any in your game. Think hard about what comparisons those contexts will invoke, and how you might make them more favorable. And of course, you are the one deciding how original your game will be, in general; you don’t have to make something with an obvious competitor if you don’t want to.

Everything is relative. We simply can’t escape that. But relative to what… now, that bit is up to you.

Back when I worked for Xbox LIVE, I frequently commented on the dangers of what I called “developer tunnel vision.” Nearly all of the devs I spoke with were not paying attention to a diverse set of industry news sources. What’s more, they were focused on at most couple of similar platforms, and were ignoring the rest of the market. (Back then, everyone was talking about XBLA/PSN; today it’s Steam/iOS; tomorrow it will be something else.)

At the time, this seemed completely insane to me—even suicidal. Didn’t these devs understand how quickly things change in our industry? How quickly their current efforts could be rendered irrelevant by shifts in the marketplace, or by strategy shifts made by the platforms? Developer tunnel vision…it was so obviously reckless and short-sighted!

But then I started my own development studio. Almost immediately, I stopped dedicating several hours a week to following industry news and found myself giving it a couple hours a month—if I was lucky. I started fixating on a couple major platforms. Turns out, it’s damned hard to make games, be a good father and husband, and do anything else at the same time.

I justify it by comparing myself to other indies. Spry Fox is actively engaged with Google Play, Apple iTunes, Amazon’s Appstore, Steam and a bevy of web portals like Facebook, Armor Games, and Kongregate. Compared to most indies who are fixated on just iTunes and/or Steam, that’s pretty good, right? Of course, since I’ve stopped reading, I’m missing crucial context about what’s happening in the very ecosystems that we’re focused on. You can only get so much insight into the market dynamics of iOS and Android by studying the performance of Triple Town. And I’m clueless about emerging platforms, European and Asian game portals, among too many other things to mention.

This article is partially a mea culpa. Folks who work at games platforms (myself formerly included) tend to be pretty judgmental about what developers should and shouldn’t be doing. Actually being a game developer is an eye-opening and humbling experience. But more importantly, I want to take this opportunity to encourage my fellow devs to do the one thing that can help counteract tunnel vision: talk to each other as regularly and often as possible! It takes less time than comprehensively consuming several news sources a day and tends to be more fun, too.

Is there a developer meetup in your area? Join it. If there isn’t, consider starting one. [Places to start your search: the IGDA chapter list and meetup.com.] Are you a member of a decent industry mail list? If not, join one and/or make one of your own. The Stanford Graduate School of Business hosts an open-to-the-public game industry list that is large and diverse.

Once you’ve connected with other developers, do yourself and everyone around a favor and don’t keep secrets. Talk about the games you’re launching. Share details about their performance. Describe things that surprised you (player reactions, revenue fluctuations… whatever.) The more you share, the more the people around you will hopefully be inclined to return the favor. And their feedback on the information you share may turn out to be invaluable.

Most game developers are never going to fully avoid tunnel vision. One way to counteract that is by making friends and sharing ideas and data. Too many of us are fixated on our “trade and design secrets.” But odds are that your secrets are worth less than you think, and your ignorance is a greater liability than you can possibly imagine. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s true for me!

This article was originally published in Game Developer Magazine. It was the fifth in a series of business columns that I am writing for GDM.

The first successful f2p games — aka “games whose primary revenue source were in-game purchases” — hit the market over a decade ago. Now they’re everywhere. They account for 8 of the top 10 grossing games on iOS as I write this. Rumor has it that all the major consoles will support f2p games in the next generation. Even our industry’s most prominent, respected developers (i.e. Popcap, Valve, etc) have begun to embrace the model.

And yet there are still many game developers in the West who have mixed feelings about f2p, worrying that it is “evil” or that it perverts gameplay. But f2p is just a tool, and like any other powerful tool it can be used to create beautiful things or it can be used to create ugly things.

Let me tell you what f2p represents to me: an opportunity to bring entertainment to billions of people without relying on advertising revenue or government subsidies. An opportunity to embrace players who want to play our games but can’t (or won’t) pay, instead of forcing them to become pirates. An opportunity to stop making disposable entertainment experiences and instead create games that live forever, supported by devoted fans who happily spend money to keep their favorite hobby alive.

For the first time in the history of mass media, we can entertain huge audiences without first bombarding them with advertisements for sugar water and corn flakes and without making them pirates. How is it that some people don’t see the beauty of this?

(Note: I’m not personally opposed to advertising in games. But I find it puzzling that so many developers accept advertising – aka psychological manipulation of consumers – as a given while decrying in-app payments.)

Any good tool can be used for evil

Yes, you can build f2p games that resemble slot machines and are designed to prey on people with addictive personalities. This is also true of card games (i.e. Blackjack), but you don’t hear people protesting against all card games (i.e. Dominion or Solitaire) as a result. So please, stop confusing the bad things you could do via f2p with everything that can be done via f2p!

Here’s a challenge for every curmudgeon out there who hates f2p games: start thinking about them as a form of progressive taxation, and allow your mind to expand from there. That’s right: a system that subsidizes the poor via the willing and gratefully-made payments of the relatively wealthy.

Think it can’t be done? Check out Triple Town and Realm of the Mad God. Both heavily favor skilled play over “purchased” advantages; unskilled, wealthy players absolutely cannot purchase their way above skilled players on the leaderboard. Neither contain systems that encourage insane levels of spending, though large monthly expenditures are possible. Nothing beyond the level of what an enthusiast might spend on a favorite real-world hobby like RC cars, golf, gardening, etc.

RotMG as progressive taxation

Realm of the Mad God generates revenue primarily via the sale of “character slots,” which allow you to play more than one character at a time, and “vaults,” which allow your characters to squirrel away more loot. Neither of these things are required to play the game and both can essentially be acquired for free by creating additional free accounts, though that’s obviously not as convenient. A large additional source of revenue comes from the sale of “keys,” which are instant portals to dungeons that most otherwise be sought out in the game. Again, buying keys isn’t a precondition to playing the game or even gaining access to dungeons; they are simply a convenience.

What’s particularly interesting about the dungeon keys in Realm of the Mad God is that they are, in many ways, the purest incarnation of the idea of f2p as a progressive tax or social good. Players want to plunder dungeons because they contain good loot. But buying a key just gets you a chance to earn that loot; you still need skill to actually earn it. And because the most lucrative dungeons are also the most deadly, wealthy players who buy keys have an explicit incentive to invite along other players, lest they die alone and lootless in their own private dungeon.

Rose-tinted glasses

It always amuses me when people pine for the “good old days” of game development, when designers weren’t concerned with base financial considerations. The arcade games that many of us grew up playing were explicitly and pain-stakingly designed to munch quarters every few minutes! But many of us still fell in love with Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Street Fighter, and were inspired by those games to become the developers we are today.

Even modern games have been impacted by their business model. Whether it’s DRM in PC games or unnecessary “online-only” features in console games intended to deter their resale, developers are constantly struggling with business challenges imposed by consumer desire for a cheaper (or free) product. There’s also the common player desire for online games to live forever, even when those games require servers and other expensive infrastructure. So why not embrace those desires?

Signing off

I’m not suggesting that f2p is for everyone. There are many amazing games that would be difficult and perhaps impossible to make as f2p games. So yes, if you love those games, keep making them. Just understand why the rest of us have chosen a different path. We’ve chosen the opportunity to entertain millions of people, for free, often without any forced advertising or government support, for years and years to come. It’s an amazing thing when you stop to really think about it.

Kabam will be operating the game from here on out and Willem Rosenthal, who has been designing the new dungeons and loot drops in RotMG for several months now, will stay on board to guide the project going forward.

RotMG will always be a special game for us. Alex Carobus is one of the most talented programmers we’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, and the game itself pushed the boundaries of what an MMO could be. When we started out, RotMG had the bare bones of a multiplayer bullet hell shooter. The foundations of the game were fascinating: coop only, permadeath, procedurally generated worlds, and retro 8-bit art. It had such promise, but it was on track to end up as just another interesting game jam prototype.

Over the course of 2+ years, we worked with Alex to turn RotMG into a full-fledged MMO with more meaningful cooperation, a trading system, guilds, a compelling advancement system and community full of passionate players. We measured fun, retention and monetization and steadily increased all of them. At this point, millions of people have played a game that at first glance appears to be a niche hobby project.

We are particularly proud of how monetization turned out in RotMG. The game is completely free-to-play, but it is not a pay-to-win game. Skill matters — much more so than in many other games — and the items we offer for sale for hard currency never imbalance the game. In fact, some purchases, such as dungeon keys, are highly social purchases that can benefit free players as much as they do the original buyer. This game is proof that a game can be profitable without abusing its players.

If you are interested in learning more about how RotMG evolved, we gave a lecture at GDC that you can watch for free at: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015659/Realm-of-the-Counter-Intuitive

We wish the best of luck to Kabam as it proceeds to make the most of a very special game. And to the RotMG community: we want you to know how grateful we are for the years of support and encouragement you gave us. We appreciate how hard you pushed us to be better at our craft, and how warmly and generously you treated us when we weren’t screwing things up. ;-) We wish we could have continued to grow RotMG alongside you, but we know we’re leaving you in good hands. In the meantime, we’re going to keep cranking away on a couple of new online games that we’ve been quietly developing for the past year or so. We can’t wait to share them with you!

-Dave & Danc

Job title: we don’t really do titles. Call yourself something amusing and/or impressive.
What we’re looking for:

• Senior level engineer (five to ten years of work experience, minimum.)
• Can program both the front end and back end of an original online game – by themselves or as half a team of two.
• Has worked on multiple shipped games in the past
• Very comfortable with frequent, rapid iteration (daily to weekly)
• Excited about original, free to play games
• Familiarity with Flash and Unity is a major plus but not a requirement. It’s actually more important for whomever we hire to be flexible and not wedded to any given language, as we frequently find ourselves adjusting our tech to meet specific circumstances.
• You must be a self-starter who can work effectively without being closely managed or prodded. This is a company for entrepreneurs, not worker bees.
• Reliability and honesty are the two most important traits to us.
• Location is not an issue; we all work remotely. But if you live in Seattle or the Bay Area, you’ll get to have lunch with us pretty regularly.  :-)

About us: Spry Fox is a successful developer of online games that have collectively reached over 30m people. Our titles include Steambirds, Triple Town, Realm of the Mad God and Panda Poet. We are passionate about two things: making great original games and bringing happiness to the world.

Send inquiries to jobs at spryfox.com