Halfbrick Studio — Annual Report

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3. Financial Highlights 4. Letter to Shareholders 6. Origination 8. In the Studio 10. The Game That Saved Halfbrick 14. About Fruit Ninja 18. Boosting Profits 22. About Jetpack Joyride 28. Game Sales: Fruit Ninja 34. Game Sales: Jetpack Joyride


Profit (U.S. dollars)

10 M

Consumer

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SHARE

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HOLDERS As regular readers of this letter will know, our energy at Halfbrick comes from the desire to impress customers rather than the zeal to best competitors. We don’t take a view on which of these approaches is more likely to maximize business success. There are pros and cons to both and many examples of highly successful competitor-focused companies. We do work to pay attention to competitors and be inspired by them, but it is a fact that the customer-centric way is at this point a defining element. One advantage — perhaps a somewhat subtle one — of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to. We invent before we have to. These investments are motivated by customer focus rather than by reaction to competition. We think this approach earns more trust with customers and drives rapid improvements in customer experience.

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Founded in 2001, Halfbrick has been on the forefront of the Australian game development industry for many years. From humble beginnings developing licensed titles for platforms such as GBA, DS and PSP, we have expanded our portfolio with a range of hugely successful, independently released games on multiple platforms. With the success of Fruit Ninja on iPhone and iPad, Halfbrick has catapulted to become one of the most well known indie developers in the world, proving that a little dev down under has the world class skills needed to make a big splash on the global market. It’s a long story — a boring story for some, a riveting story for others. Either way, know that Halfbrick is here to stay with its fun, unique and innovative titles on a broad range of platforms. Check out our games page for the full range, and keep up to date with the latest news at the Halfbrick blog!

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HALFBRICK FRIDAYS Halfbrick Fridays is one of the ways the Brisbane, Australia-based company comes up with new ideas for its games. Fruit Ninja — its greatest hit to date — came out of this. About five to seven times a year, the company organizes these Halfbrick Fridays, they told me, where the whole company (about 70 people at this point), breaks into groups of around five people to brainstorm new ideas. The cool thing here is that it’s not just the game designers and developers who participate, but anybody who works for the company — be that in accounting or quality assurance — participates in these sessions. 8


Age of Zombies, for example, is the result of this process (though Larsen and McKinney told me the final version looked very different from the prototype). So is Monster Dash. These events either last for about a week or are spread out to one day during a period of about five to seven weeks. Once the idea for Fruit Ninja was born, it only took a few months to make, but some game ideas, the team told me, have been floating around for years and have yet to become reality.

From idea to game. 9


In early 2010, Halfbrick released a PSP mini called Rocket Racing. After years working on licensed titles for the GameBoy Advance and DS, they were finally working on their own IP. Rocket Racing received a lukewarm critical reception. It was abstract, sleek, complicated, and challenging. It was also a commercial failure. The studio had poured six months into developing the game — it

executive

was a heavy investment for a

producer and

small studio — and it didn’t need

game designer at Halfbrick.

a commercial flop at a time when

“That was the case for pretty much

things weren’t looking good for

everyone around that time, but things

the Australian games industry.

were definitely pretty tough after Rocket Racing. Luckily, Fruit Ninja

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“Like everyone, we were doing

came along.” Muscat almost makes

it tough,” says Luke Muscat, an

it sound too easy. Fruit Ninja didn’t


accidentally wander into the Halfbrick

was not working. Halfbrick were

offices and decide to stay and make

feeling the pinch — a lot of licensed

them a lot of money. Rather, it came

work in Australia was drying up and

at a time when the studio needed

the original IPs they’d developed for

to do something different because

Xbox Live weren’t enough to keep

what they had been doing clearly

the company running. They needed 11


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a saviour — a Fruit Ninja — but

didn’t. Taking lessons from their

that game wouldn’t just magically

failures, they began work on a game

appear. Like all their games, the

built on everything they learned.

Halfbrick team thought long and hard

“We learned a whole heap from

about the games they’d worked on,

Rocket Racing about what not to do,”

identifying what worked and what

says Muscat. “We learned things like,


a concept that can be explained in three to four words. “A common recurring concept we have for Fruit Ninja is ‘Slice fruit with finger’, whereas with Rocket Racing it was always a bit of a complicated task to explain what was going on. ‘It’s this abstract top-down racing game where you use a rocket and you can boost off walls’ doesn’t come off quite as elegantly as ‘Slice fruit with finger’ and ‘Avoid bombs’,” he says. Muscat says that some of the top-tier iOS games at the time also directly influenced Fruit Ninja, specifically Canabalt, Doodle Jump, and Flight Control. Elements like simple and intuitive inputs (line-drawing in Flight Control, don’t make your game difficult

tilting in Doodle Jump), short-session times, tight retry loops and the way the games dealt with scoring and

to control, don’t use an

failure gave Muscat ideas on ways

abstract theme, and don’t make

to craft Fruit Ninja. Having worked

it tremendously difficult to play.

extensively with DS games also

We learned a lot about branding

influenced the slicing mechanic that

and marketing in terms of having

has become the core of Fruit Ninja.

something that people can grasp onto, something bright and colourful, 13


In Fruit Ninja, the player slices fruit with a blade controlled via the touch screen. As the fruit is thrown onto the screen, the player swipes their finger across the screen to create a slicing motion, attempting to slice the fruit in half. Extra points are awarded for slicing multiple fruits with one swipe, and players can use additional fingers to make multiple slices simultaneously. Players must slice all fruit; if three fruits are missed, the game ends, but upon reaching scores that are multiples of one hundred (i.e. 100, 200, 300, etc.), the player will gain an extra life (unless they have not missed a piece of fruit already). Bombs are occasionally thrown onto the screen, and will also end the game should the player slice them.

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What’s interesting about how Halfbrick turns its game ideas into actual products is that virtually all of its games use one underlying engine (written almost exclusively in C++). The core engine team consists of six “hardcore programmers,” as McKinney told me, and they ensure that those teams that work on the individual games have a stable architecture that they can then write their own code for.

database for better scalability.

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One of Halfbrick’s larger teams, by

The point of the core engine,

the way, is now the cloud service

the team stressed, is to be able

team that provides the back-end

to publish apps across platforms

technology to connect games

as easily as possible. Many game

together across platforms. Halfbrick

developers who have a hit on one

uses Amazon’s EC2 platform for this

platform often find themselves

and recently switched to a NoSQL

struggling to port their games


to another platform, which can

All the core parts of the code are

take months and could make

written in C++. Jetpack Joyride is

them lose precious momentum.

no exception. “A lot of companies

Halfbrick Studios releases games

get into the mistake of writing

for Windows, Xbox, PlayStation,

just in Objective C and put all of

Windows Phone, Android and iOS.

their game logic etc. in Objective 19


C,� McKinney told me. “How do

languages as little as possible. The

you get that into Android?�

core engine provides the developers with generic interfaces into the

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To avoid having to rewrite a lot of

engine that abstracts almost all of

code, Halfbrick just uses C++ across

the platform specifics for them and

the board and drops into native

using C++ gives the teams control


various native platforms. Most of the development at Halfbrick happens in Visual Studio, though the team does need to use Apple’s Xcode every now and then. Visual Studio, McKinney told me, “is the best environment for creating games as far as we are concerned.” Halfbrick doesn’t want its developers to have to learn lots of different environments and the pipeline the team has created allows coders to work almost exclusively in Visual Studio and C++, even when they are developing for HTML5. Being in Brisbane, the two told me, gives them access to a great pool of developers (there are also small teams that work over performance and lets them fine-tune things and control

out of Sydney, San Francisco and Spain). Brisbane features a number of game development schools and college programs,

memory usage. C++, they also

so finding talent isn’t all that hard.

stressed, offers a large number

Given that C++ has long been the

of third-party libraries for game

standard in the gaming world, game

developers. Halfbrick then uses a

developers with the right kind of

mix of open source and proprietary

experience aren’t all that hard to find.

tools to publish the code to the 21


The game uses a simple, one-touch system to control the jetpack; when the player presses anywhere on the touchscreen, the jetpack fires and Barry rises. When the player lets go, the jetpack turns off, and Barry falls. Because he is continually in motion, the player does not control his speed, simply his movement along the vertical axis. The objective of the game is to travel as far as possible, collect coins, and avoid hazards such as zappers, missiles and high-intensity laser beams. As the player travels, golden coloured “Spin Tokens� occasionally appear, which the player can collect. At the end of each run, these spin tokens are used in a slot machine (one token gives one spin) which can award the player various prizes.

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Profit (U.S dollars)

5M

2012

2011

2010

Fifty-nine percent of income from North America.

INTERNATIONAL 12%

59%

10%

2% 6% 11%

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Two-thirds of Fruit Ninja players also play other types of video games including casual or hardcore games.

IN-APP ADS Halfbrick CMO Phil Larsen has revealed that the free version of Fruit Ninja is currently generating more than $400,000 revenue a month from in-app ads. Speaking to Ad Age, Larsen said the figure represents a decent amount of income for the firm, though isn’t excessive given the franchise’s popularity. Despite the free version’s popularity, however, Larsen said the studio still makes more money from paid downloads.

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Consumer

Fruit Ninja accumulated 62 million dollars by the year 2013.

Downloads

Angry Birds

Fruit Ninja

Doodle Jump

Cut The Rope

Words With Friends

00M

150 M

DOWNLOADS

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Profit (U.S dollars)

5M

2014

2013

2012

Thirty-two percent of income from North America.

INTERNATIONAL 35%

32%

12%

1% 5% 15%

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Over half of Jetpack Joyride players also play other types of video games including casual or hardcore games.

SOARING PROFITS If there’s something that seems to be paying off for casual developers, it’s taking a popular game and making it free-to-play. According to developer Halfbrick, Jetpack Joyride has seen a total of 25 million downloads. That’s certainly impressive, but what’s especially interesting is that 23 million downloads took place after the game became a free-to-play in mid-December of 2012.

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Consumer

Jetpack Joyride accumulated 12 million dollars by the year 2014.

Downloads

Fruit Ninja

Words With Friends

Temple Run

Jetpack Joyride

Age Of Zombies

25M

70 M

DOWNLOADS

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IAN “RIP” VAN WINKLE

GRAPHIC DESIGNER & CREATIVE VISIONARY IANVANWINKLE.COM


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