Idol Minds thinking mobile for gaming’s future

LOUISVILLE — Even as the world — or at least a few hundred million gamers around the globe — breathlessly awaits the launch of Sony’s newest gaming console, the PlayStation 4, a Louisville-based game developer that produced some of the company’s biggest hits is turning to the mobile gaming market for its future audience.

At its peak, Idol Minds LLC had up to 70 coders, artists and other gaming professionals working on multiple projects at its headquarters on Century Place in Louisville. The company’s first game, Cool Boarders 3, was a hit just a year after the company opened in 1997, and its 2007 release Pain became the most downloaded game on the PlayStation Network in 2009. But changes in the industry and recent setbacks have forced the company to pare down to fewer than a dozen employees and rethink where the game market is headed.

Mark Lyons, Idol Minds’ president and chief technology officer and a former Sony employee, said Sony Computer Entertainment is focusing on big-budget games that require hundreds of designers and years to build, squeezing more moderate developers such as Idol Minds out of the market. Although Idol Minds was busy last year re-engineering the Ratchet and Clank games, last month Sony abruptly canceled development of the highly anticipated game Warrior’s Lair, being designed in Louisville for the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita handheld system.

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“It was hugely frustrating,” Lyons said. “We were really proud of that game and now it’s completely out of our hands. We have no idea whether it will ever surface or not.”

In the wake of the cancellation, Lyons and his team have turned to the hot gaming market for mobile devices that are tied to Apple’s versatile iOS operating system and Google’s Android OS.

“Everything we have in development is for mobile devices,” Lyons said. “The hardware is getting powerful enough that you can do larger-scale games with higher fidelity graphics. We’re still doing the same scale and quality of game that we did for the PlayStation 2, but adapting our approach for the mobile platforms.”

The company’s first experiment in mobile gaming was launched last year with the release of Linked Together, an addictive puzzle-based application that taught Idol Minds a few lessons about the differences between console and mobile games.

“We learned a lot looking at how people were playing the game,” Lyons said. “We were focused on the aspects that were interesting to us, the multiplayer competition and head-to-head gameplay. Then we figured out that 96 percent of the games on these platforms are single player.”

That revelation led the developers to their new strategy, focusing on free-to-play games such as Candy Crush Saga, the iTunes megahit developed by casual game developer King that draws more than 40 million users monthly. These types of games employ a monetization strategy that puts a “currency” between the player and the app creator in the form of in-game purchases for upgrades or special items — an aspect of mobile gaming that led Apple to settle a class-action lawsuit with 23 million iTunes account holders earlier this year.

“We want the games to be addictive because that’s our interest,” Lyons said. “Now it just happens to be a part of the making of money.”

Lyons also believes the types of gamers interested in mobile games are more diverse than some might expect.

“They’re fast, so there’s room for us to experiment and try something different,” he said. “I’m not sure we understand completely the casual-gamer audience but there are enough people interested in these devices that there will be room for mid-to-hardcore gamers, rather than just focusing on casual gaming.”

The speed of the development life cycle has been another refreshing change for the Idol Minds team. A full-scale console game takes years of development, while mobile games progress exponentially faster. Idol Minds’ developers will workshop a dozen game ideas at a time, then select the best to prototype to the level of “minimum viable product,” the standard at which game publishers will consider the game. That cycle can take as few as six months.

“We try to finish a game enough to get it out there and watch it growing,” Lyons said. “Then we see what is working, what is not working, and can finish the game from there. With a smaller game, you can get them out quickly and react much faster.”

Idol Minds remains open to the console market, but only on its own terms during these volatile times.

“If the PlayStation Network continues to thrive and got big enough, we would be back there in a second,” Lyons said. “But the difference in the size of that network versus the market available to us in the App Store is huge.”