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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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