We’re rolling out our new Leaping Lemmings for iPad app this week, with thanks to the good people at GameTheory, who programmed the app. Thanks to all of you who have helped us by downloading the app and giving us your feedback already. To everyone else, please DO support us by downloading the app – it’s a whopping $2.99 – and let us know what you think of our latest digital product.

While we’re thinking about the fledgling digital side of GMT, I want to give you guys an update on where we are and what we’re planning as we begin to really get rolling with our digital games. As befits a blog called “InsideGMT,”  I want give you all a look deeper inside our digital effort, basically “how Gene thinks about this stuff.” As you might imagine, that includes good, bad, even ugly, but I’m not going to hold back because I want you guys to understand the challenges we face as well as the opportunities that are before us.

Early Efforts – In Search of Good Partners

First off, I think it’s important, in business as well as in life, to understand what you do well and where you could use some help. At GMT, what we do well, due to  some outstanding teams of designers, developers, testers, artists, and support staff, is designing and producing  boardgames that our customers enjoy playing. That’s our core competency and, over 24 years, has become our identity in the game marketplace. Every person we bring onboard to work with us – from those early days of “just Jewel and me,” to bringing on Rodger and later Mark, Tony, and Andy, and all of the designers and their teams – every one of them brings their considerable skills to the GMT family for the purpose of helping us continue to create games that bring enjoyment to our customers.

So as I began to look at setting up a digital side of GMT 4-5 years ago, two things were really clear to me: 1) that creating digital games in-house was outside of our core competency (as well as our budget),  and 2) all of our team members – and some of them work in the computer game world in their day jobs – were devoting all of their “GMT time” to the boardgames and were not really going to be available to help us with the digital efforts. Understanding that, the only way forward that I saw back then was to find companies or individuals with the interest, experience, and ability to create good digital games, and either license our games to them to produce, or create a “sweat equity” partnership whereby they did the coding work up front and we shared the profits with them later.

After a couple months of talking to a variety of digital companies, it became obvious that none of them wanted to work with us! I guess, in hindsight, that shouldn’t have been so surprising, given that we are a pretty small fish in a large gaming pond and that our staple (wargames) doesn’t historically bring in a large and broad customer base, making return on investment for doing a game with GMT very “iffy,” from their perspective. Even understanding their point of view, it still “stung” a little that essentially no company out there wanted to partner with us to create digital versions of our games.

I began to talk a bit about our “search” for programming teams in our monthly e-mail updates, and pretty soon a BUNCH (actually about 30, but that was a BUNCH to me at the time) of programmers were sending me emails and showing me demos and telling me how much they’d like to help us do digital versions of our games. And the thing was, virtually all of these guys were our CUSTOMERS, people who already liked and understood our games. I liked that a LOT and really didn’t have any other good options at that point, so I screened them as best I could and then agreed with about a dozen of them to create a variety of our games as iOS games. Four years later, knowing what I know now, I see that was not really the best path, but at the time, I didn’t really see another way forward. So we began.

I’ll save you guys several paragraphs of anguish (ours!) by just saying “It didn’t go well.” For a variety of reasons, one program team after another had to drop their project. Sometimes it was job or family or other real world committments, sometimes the task was just a lot harder than they’d originally anticipated. What I saw in the trend was the truth that “when you are doing something as a second or third job or a hobby and the real world intervenes, the first thing you drop is the 2nd/3rd job or the hobby.” And that’s what we saw occur, again and again. I don’t blame those people at all. I just didn’t really understand that dynamic back then any better than they did when they signed up. So I tell you this with absolutely no animosity toward any of those folks, but with a lot of regret, so that you understand where our path has taken us.

For the record, one guy of that original dozen finished his project – Dominant Species for iPad. I know to this day, that game isn’t yet all that we want it to be (more on that in Part II), but I have to say, given the scope of the project and his limited available time to program and the fact that he did it ALL himself, I think Luc did a really amazing job. Especially when you consider it in light of all of our other failures. But even there the “one man hobbyist” model jumped up and bit us, because shortly after the game was released, in the midst of an update project that we had promised to our customers, his real job committments went crazy and Luc had to drop out as well. He was really great about it – gave us the code and asked us not to give him any royalties and was incredibly helpful every way he could be – but we were then stuck. And I saw clearly that we were really in a WORSE place with Dominant Species that if we’d never made the app – because now we had no way to support it. Again, I’ll talk in detail about DS and what’s happening with it in Part II, but for now, that’s how it fits into our “path to finding good partners.”

Changes and Opportunities that Helped Us Find Better Partners

As I saw all those original projects uncompleted, I resolved that we were only going to work with established companies from that point on. Easy to say, but there was still that “none of those companies want to work with us” reality from my earlier search. So I ventured back out to make some contacts. Fortunately, there were several things going on in the background that helped us to meet with more interest this time around:

1. Several of our  games like Twilight Struggle, Dominant Species, and Commands & Colors sold really well for us. More to the point, they all sold well OUTSIDE the traditional wargame markets. So we had some “crossover games” that were getting GMT noticed outside the small pond of the wargame industry.

2. Digital Publishers were seeing some success with boardgame conversions in general.  Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Cataan, Carcassonne, Stone Age, Puerto Rico, and others were very well received on the app store and beyond. Because some of our games in #1- especially Twilight Struggle – were seen as “peer type games” to some of these successful apps, at least some digital publishers had GMT – or maybe just Twilight Struggle – on their radar as a potentially profitable possibility.

3. Wargames proved they could do well as apps. True, there aren’t a LOT of them, but Slitherine and Shenandoah (very interesting news today that Slitherine bought Shenandoah!)  especially come to mind as companies that created slick wargame products for the app store and proved that tens of thousands of  gamers would pay a premium price to play wargames on their iPads.

4. Playdek happened. In 2011, this new company, composed of a bunch of savvy veteran console developers, hit the App Store like a tornado with a stunningly elegant digital conversion of Ascension. I downloaded Ascension as soon as I saw it on the app store, played a bunch of games (and that style of game isn’t even really one of my favorites), and concluded “These guys are legit!”  As a player, I especially loved the elegance of their user interface and the fact that their AI beat me enough times for me to call it names. 🙂 I remember thinking “Wouldn’t it be cool if THESE GUYS would do one of our games?”

Some time later, I got an e-mail from a guy named Joel – turns out he was the President/CEO of Playdek. He said they were interested in licensing Twilight Struggle. I went from excitement at seeing Playdek’s interest to dismay (because we had already licensed Twilight Struggle – that’s another story, but one that most of you probably know already anyway). So reluctantly, I wrote back that Twilight Struggle wasn’t available, but that we had another game series (Commands & Colors) that I’d love to talk with them about.

Fast forward a couple years. We made a deal with Playdek for C&C, but it had to wait its turn behind a bunch of other Playdek committments. Joel assured me they still loved the games and were committed to doing them, but I didn’t really correspond with Playdek much at that point, but had our team ready to go whenever Playdek was ready. Then, early this year, we finally pulled the plug on our other Twilight Struggle for PC project, believing in the end that it just wasn’t going to get done at the quality we needed. I hated that, because I really liked that whole project team. And I knew our customers were going to be upset, to get nothing after such a long wait (fortunately we hadn’t actually taken any money for the game). It was a tough decision, but it had to be done.

After the dust settled, I thought, “If I could pick anyone to create an amazing digital Twilight Struggle, who would it be?” The answer was obvious to me, so I got back in touch with Joel at Playdek and asked “Would you guys by any chance still be interested in Twilight Struggle?” The answer surprised me a little: “Yes, but we want to run a Kickstarter Project for it, create a new team just for Twilight Struggle, and do it first, before Commands & Colors.”  I checked with Richard Borg (what a great guy!) and he was fine with Twilight Struggle going first. So I told Joel “yes” as long as they’d help us run the Kickstarter project, as we didn’t really have the time or people to devote to it – not to mention that they know how to run KS projects and we don’t.

So, we had an agreement. And it was a dream agreement, from my point of view. We get to work with Playdek! How awesome is that?!? I was truly surprised when I saw some of the responses from Playdek team members – I had no idea that several of them were HUGE Twilight Struggle fans. They were like “Wow, we get to work on Twilight Struggle with GMT!” Funny how things work out….

I’ll pick up the story in part II, but to wrap up this section, we’ve recently found another “Good Partner” in GameTheory, who did a great job with Leaping Lemmings for iPad, and continue to look for more (face it, we have a lot of games!). And let’s just say that as “Good Partners” go, my view is “Playdek rocks!”

Next Time in Part II: Twilight Struggle with Playdek, GameTheory and Leaping Lemmings, Dominant Species, and Other Opportunities

Author: Gene Billingsley