Gabriel Leydon co-founded Machine Zone (formerly known as Addmired) and has served as its Chief Executive Officer since January 2008. Mr. Leydon is the company’s visionary and overseas product design, monetization, recruiting as well as all levels of operations.
Under Mr. Leydon’s direction, Machine Zone has changed the face of mobile gaming with its most recent game, “Game of War – Fire Age”, a real-time mobile massively-multiplayer online __game and parallel chat-speak translation application that translates over 40 languages for its players in real-time, connecting __game players around the globe at the same time in a single virtual universe.
Prior to co-founding Addmired, Mr. Leydon spent seven years in the coin-op arcade business at companies such as Atari, Tsunami Visual and Global VR. From 2006 to 2007, Mr. Leydon designed, from concept to completion, the “America’s Army” arcade game, the very first arcade game designed for the U.S. Army. With support from the Pentagon and the U.S. Armed Forces, Mr. Leydon launched a successful advertising campaign with a 24/7 running commercial for the Army in highly trafficked areas such as movie theaters and arcades.
As a prominent figure in the games industry, Mr. Leydon has had speaking engagements at high-profile industry conferences such as the Games Developers Conference, MobileBeat, Casual Connect, and Inside Social Apps and has been featured in the media with such publications as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TechCrunch and VentureBeat.
Few people in the mobile game world are more passionate or outspoken than Gabe Leydon.
So if the founder and CEO of Machine Zone (previously Addmired) has been quiet recently, it's with good reason.
He's been working on a new game .
"It ended up being much more than I thought it would be," he says of the 16 month development of Game of War: Fire Age.
"It took on a life of its own."
Something different
Never one to shy away from an ambitious goal, Game of War is Machine Zone's latest attempt to combine the best elements of a PC MMOG with the 24/7 accessibility of mobile gaming.
It's a process that started for the company way back in 2009 with games such as iMob Online, Original Gangstaz and Global War.
Game of War is the culmination of those millions of downloads and ten of millions of hours of gameplay, not to mention the $8 million investment round Machine Zone closed in March 2012.
In Leydon's view, it's also a very different game from what's being offered by other mobile developers.
"We're going in the opposite direction to the mid-core trend," he explains.
"This is a complicated game. We're trying to make it more complicated. I think players need to feel like they are mastering something."
Making it mobile
It's a decision that seems to be bearing fruit, though.
During a prolonged soft launch in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, France and Mexico, Leydon says that the average player has been spending two hours daily in Game of War.
He says it's an amazing figure, particularly as it's broken down into across 10 sessions per day.
"People are playing it more than people play PC MMOGs," he says.
"It's because we put everyone into a single, persistent, real-time world and they can always play it, because it's on their phone. That's the strength of the game because that's the strength of mobile."
In this way Leydon argues developers who look to bring 'console experiences' to mobile, don't understand the market.
"You don't need to bring a console experience to mobile. You need to focus on the unique properties of mobile," he says.
"It's not about the graphics. And it's not about the touch interface. It's about accessible and persistent online gaming."
More than money
In a similar manner, Leydon has strong words about the industry's approach to monetisation.
Game of War is free-to-play (exclusive to iOS) but it's a longterm project for the company.
"If people play your game for 100 hours, it's not a big deal for them to spend money. But it is if you're trying to monetise after two hours," Leydon says.
Indeed, Machine Zone's entire approach is to focus on getting people to play its games, for long periods of time, and getting them deeply engaged with social features; in the case of Game of War its alliances system.
"There's special alliance currency which can be used to buy premium items for free," he points out.
"Getting people into an alliance is more important to us than getting money from them.
"Free-to-play isn't about pushing people to spend money. Not enough developers realise this."
It's about time
And this is why, for Leydon, the key metric is always time.
"I want players' time. Making the game fun is about trying to capture more of the players' time, and the time a player puts into the game is what makes it fun," he explains.
"We have loads of features in the game. There's a hierarchy of players, there's the whole history of your gameplay, and the game is a means of broadcasting this."
In that context, monetisation is a necessary - but secondary - outcome.
"The bottomline is you can't make money with free-to-play games if people aren't playing your game," Leydon ends.
"Free-to-play is the monetisation of time and this game is going to running for years."
No comments:
Post a Comment