The world of mobile games is extremely fast-paced, and in just a few short years ngmoco helped shape the industry as we know it today. Now the founding members of ngmoco are returning to the mobile gaming space with their new company N3twork, according to an interview with Gamesindustry.biz.
In the early days of the App Store, ngmoco’s desire was to bring legitimacy to gaming on the iPhone. In December of 2008 they released Rolando, which was an excellent platformer developed by Hand Circus that featured a fantastic art style and clever design. More importantly, it actually felt like the first truly “made for iPhone" game, as it made smart use of the tilt and touch capabilities of the hardware. Rolando was a huge success and just six months later a sequel was released which offered an even bigger and more colorful adventure. With a 3rd Rolando game already planned and many more titles in the works, ngmoco seemed poised to be the preeminent developer of iPhone games.
Then in November of 2009, ngmoco released Eliminate, one of the first serious stabs at the online multiplayer first-person shooter on iPhone. Eliminate actually worked amazingly well on the touchscreen, and fragging against friends and strangers alike in multiplayer still stands out as some of the best times I’ve ever had iPhone gaming. However, Eliminate wasn’t just a great shooter, it was also among the first big free to play games that used an energy mechanic and consumable IAP, paving the way for most free to play games since.
Eliminate was a runaway success, and after that ngmoco went all-in on free to play. If I remember correctly they even coined the term “freemium" as they were offering premium gaming experiences with a free (initial) price tag. The company saw even more success with their new free to play games like We Rule, Touch Pets and Godfinger, bringing tons of users and tons of money into their ecosystem. This led to ngmoco being purchased by Japanese social gaming giant DeNA, who was looking for a way to break into the mobile gaming scene in the West.
After the DeNA acquisition you didn’t hear a lot from ngmoco, and eventually the servers for all their previous free to play games were shut down and many of those games disappeared from the App Store. In October of 2012, almost exactly two years after the DeNA buyout, the co-founders of ngmoco Neil Young and Bob Stevenson left the company.
Anyway, five paragraphs and about 400 words later and that was supposed to be a brief history of ngmoco, but the point is that the company and the people behind it were incredible visionaries in the early days of mobile gaming. And now those visionaries are returning to the world of games. After leaving DeNA in 2012, Young, Stevenson and third ngmoco co-founder Alan Yu started a company called N3twork which built a video streaming service. Now, they’re shifting the focus of N3twork to making games, and as they explain on their blog, coming back to gaming is like “coming home." Here’s a photo of N3twork founders (from left to right): Stephen Detwiler, Alan Yu, Neil Young and Bob Stevenson.
During the two years they spent under the DeNA umbrella, the folks who make up N3twork were able to see how gaming operates and succeeds outside of the West, specifically in the Japanese market. Then during the following two years after leaving, they were able to see how consumers use their mobile devices and the types of things those consumers wanted from a mobile experience with their Network TV app. Now they are poised to take everything they’ve learned and apply it to their new games.
While nothing has been officially revealed yet, N3twork does have one game in the works already, and they’re planning on another one by year’s end. Both the Gamesindustry.biz interview and the N3twork blog post are well worth reading in full, as it’s obvious these guys “get it" and I’m incredibly excited to see what types of games they’ll be coming up with in the future.
[Gamesindustry.biz and the N3twork Blog]
