Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 7)

SM: How did you penetrate the market and get early traction?

JW: While I was at Shockwave, I had the privilege to work with some of the top developers in casual games. We saw the opportunity to help those developers do what they love – focus on making games – by becoming the first publisher in casual games. Game making is an art, but if you want to do it for very long you also need to focus on efficient production practices, business development, marketing, sales, finance, legal, etc. Shipping a good game is hard enough, but creating the foundation for a long-term business is even harder. We provide that solution to our developers.

We were also fortunate to attract the right investors, management team and superstar employees that make unbelievable products at a very quick pace. Having our first launch, Diner Dash, turn into the #1 franchise in the industry also didn’t hurt!

SM. What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track?

JW: Our revenue reached almost $5 million in 2006. We have enjoyed triple-digit annual growth since we started, and we expect that to continue into 2008 and beyond. We receive over 50 million brand impressions per DAY across our 24-title game portfolio. PlayFirst.com receives nearly a million unique visitors per month, and high scores are posted from a PlayFirst title once every eleven seconds.

(to be continued)

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Part 6]

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10