The friction was low, so playership increased. Newtoy not only made its app load quickly, but also allowed users to start a game just by entering another player's username. Back in 2009, EA's iPhone Scrabble displayed a lengthy animated splash screen (it still does), then required registration to start games with friends. Next to EA's faithful recreation of Scrabble's staid wooden tiles and pastel board, Words With Friends' bright, rounded, plasticy look felt fresh, clean, and well aligned with the minimalist mobile devices on which the game was first played.įrom an experience design perspective, Newtoy did an expert job with the app's startup and "onboarding" experience. These alterations partly helped the game avoid copyright infringement challenges, but they also recast the familiar crossword formula in a new visual light. Visually, Newtoy's crossword game wasn't very different from Scrabble or Scrabulous in play, although the developers wisely revised the appearance of the tiles and board along with the position of bonuses and the value of individual letters. Not game design, either, but visual and experience design. We'll never know exactly why, but for once design may have triumphed over marketing. Electronic Arts had managed to get an officially licensed iPhone version of Scrabble to market in 2008, and with the downfall of Scrabulous it seemed impossible that an upstart like Newtoy could upset a game with a 60-year head start.īut amazingly, it did. Still, Words With Friends was hardly a sure thing. Newtoy thus had a number of things going for it in advance of the release of Words With Friends: a technology infrastructure for facilitating asynchronous play for mobile devices a brand-name for such games ("With Friends") the untimely demise of an incumbent competitor ( Scrabulous later relaunched as Lexulous and Hasbro dropped its lawsuit, but the game never achieved its former glory) and a helpful reminder of the legal obstacles that the studio might face if it didn't offer a substantially different audiovisual presentation from the genre's ur-game. That's the same year an infringement lawsuit from Scrabble's North American copyright owner Hasbro had driven Scrabulous off of Facebook after a year of intense popularity on the platform. Words With Friends was the second title from Dallas studio Newtoy, which first released Chess With Friends on iPhone in 2008. With its stock down and its prospects in question, the company has faced multiple executive resignations and fielded tough criticism from financial analysts.Įven if the shift from web to mobile social games is still just a theory, Zynga seems to have all but disavowed a proven, continuously successful game that performs well across both platforms: Words With Friends. Obviously, this isn't a hypothetical scenario. In the meantime, imagine you had let your most successful mobile title wallow in disregard since acquiring its creator more than a year before. Oh, and just for kicks, also imagine that you'd recently spent a couple hundred million dollars to acquire a smaller studio with a red-hot mobile title, but that said game's performance had declined rapidly in the quarter after the acquisition. Imagine too that analysts had suggested that an underdeveloped and under-executed mobile strategy was cause for worry among investors in both cases. And let's also imagine that the social network facilitating most of your business was also taking a hammering on Wall Street. Say that you had recently gone public, but your stock was down sixfold from its IPO price. Imagine that you were a big game studio that had built your business around free-to-play social network games.
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