Based in London, Canada, Big Blue Bubble were founded in 2004 by industry veterans and have quickly established themselves as mobile developers, working with I-play and other developers on brands such as Jewel Quest. They've now made the move into Wii, DS and casual game development, and Games on Deck talks to CEO Damir Slogar.
Games On Deck: Tell us about Big Blue Bubble.
Damir Slogar: Big Blue Bubble was established in January 2004 as the result of my 20 years of game industry experience as well as 2 years of research of the mobile and handheld games market. In less than 4 years, we've developed over 25 mobile games that sold several million of copies and won numerous awards from various ‘game of the month' and ‘game of the year' to a BAFTA award (for 24: Agent Down). In 2005, we established console game division with focus on Nintendo platforms and in late 2006 we expanded our studio with a casual games department.
GOD: Tell us about recent Big Blue Bubble titles that you consider particular successes.
DS: One of our most successful mobile games is the Jewel Quest series. iWin came up with the winning brand, I-Play made the right choice picking up the license and we developed it. With over 2 million downloads it is indeed a jewel. Another title I believe will be very successful and what's more important it represents our development and designing skills is the Elven Chronicles series. Elven Chronicles recently launched in Europe and it will be available on US carriers by the end of the year. This massive RPG features over 20 hours of gameplay as well as additional adventures available as downloadable content.
Damir Slogar
GOD: How did you come to attract publishers such as I-play and brands such as 24?
DS: It's quite simple actually. Make sure that you always develop top quality games and they will come to you. If you look at our portfolio at www.bigbluebubble.com you will notice that majority of our mobile games are based on top brands.
GOD: I notice that you also work on DS and have now made the move into Wii development. Why?
DS: There are several reasons why we started with Nintendo development. First, that was our strategy from the day one because my core team experience is from console development. Of course, starting next-gen or even DS project as small studio wasn't really feasible so mobile games were great way to kick start the development and start generating some revenues that will help us expand into the console space. Also, in order to continue growth (we've grown at 100% per year for last 4 years), we needed either to expand our services and offer porting or start focusing on publishing aspect. Our passion was of course game development and in order to maintain 30 people studio (our size when we started DS development), we needed to find, pitch, negotiate and develop at least 12-15 games per year. In mobile gaming industry, this is quite hard.
GOD: Is expansion to new platforms a natural move for a mobile developer?
DS: This is one of the options for mobile developer if they want to grow beyond 2-3 mobile teams. Other ones either offer full service (porting, QA), focusing on technology or a unique niche, or moving into publishing. Our choice was expanding to new platforms.
GOD: Do you plan on continuing to develop mobile games?
DS: Yes. Mobile technology we developed in last 4 years allows us to do rapid prototyping and focus on gameplay rather than worrying about platform limitations and technical issues.
