Interview with Jake Birkett (Grey Alien), Big Fish Games Lead Programmer
11 02 2009Jake Birkett is well known in the indie game developers community. He developed Holiday Bonus, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Fairway Solitaire. In the end of 2008 he made a transition to Big Fish Games and is no longer indie, but he still works on great games. If you want to learn more about Jake, find out what makes a best seller game and how indies can compete in todays market start reading now.
NOTE: In this interview Jake speaks for himself and not as BFG representative in any way.
Fairway Solitaire was published over 14 months ago. Isn’t it the time for a new release? When we can expect it?
You can expect it around the Weekend of Sat 21st Feb. This is 100% certain now unless something crazy happens. I’ve spent a long time on this game (about 11 months) but I’ve been pretty busy moving continent and other stuff…
Should we expect another hidden object game?
No. BFG in Seattle makes those, we are tasked with making other games in Vancouver. It will be fun to hear what people say about it – mixed opinions no doubt, but as long as the customer love it (and express their love with their credit cards) then I’m happy.
Ok, so how did you get started in game development?
In 2005 I went full-time Indie after making business software for 9 years in Delphi and SQL. I’ve always made games as a hobby since the age of 8 (I’m 33 now) in BASIC, assembly, C, C++, Delphi, Blitz and probably a few other things along the way. I reached a certain point where I realised that I enjoyed making games so much that I just *had* to do it for a living – so I stopped doing business software and started writing games professionally. I made two downloadable match-3 games and was contracted by Injoy Games to make a 3rd, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which went well.
Match-3 as a jump start in game development career? That’s how you’ve met BFG?
Emmanuel from Big Fish Games Europe saw Oz and thought it was programmed well and asked if I would be interested in programming a game for them. I had to think about this quite hard because I saw it as great opportunity to learn more about casual games from some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry, yet I also was keen on building up my own business and working for BFG would slow that down. Also frankly at the time I needed the money because, as many Indies will know, it takes quite a long time to build your business up to the point where you are making a half-decent living. In the end I said “yes” and signed a contract to program Fairway Solitaire. However, before I started work on that game I quickly launched Holiday Bonus using an upgraded Oz engine, and it’s done really well for me over the last 2 years.
Fairway Solitaire was a great success for BFG. Why solitaire? Solitaires were not so popular at that time?
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Ahahaha. I didn’t make $200k in 2008. That’s the revenue from direct sales through my main payment provider. I earn other amounts from other deals. And then to find out how much I actually *make* you’d have to subtract all the expenses, and they can be surprisingly high when you actually pay for advertising, and a dedicated server. I guess the way I achieve it is to make games that are not easily copied and cloned, and I put quite a lot of work into promoting them. I also get very into the business side of selling games. if you sell games, and you don’t know which pages on your website have the lowest bounce rates, if you don’t know what the average CPC is for your ads and do A/B testing to increase the CTR…. and much more importantly, if you have no idea WTF I’m talking about, then you are quite simply losing sales to people like me, who study this stuff :D.
