Fishlabs boss Michael Schade on its new revenue stream.
How did Fishlabs get its deal to make a free iPhone game for Volkswagen? Believe it or not, it came from the son of a senior VW exec asking his father 'Why haven't Volkswagen got anything on iPhone?'
At least, that's how it started, according to Michael Schade, CEO of Fishlabs, speaking at the Mobile Games Forum in London.
It launched Volkswagen Polo Challenge on 2nd March last year, and 350,000 copies were downloaded within the first five days. The game has now done more than 2.2 million downloads, and people are averaging four sessions of gameplay - 440,000 hours of brand engagement for Volkswagen.
"They said 'this is so strong, we completely moved from online Flash games to iPhone games'," says Schade, of Volkswagen's advergame strategy.
Schade also revealed some numbers on the demographics of people playing the Polo Challenge game. 91% of players were male - unsurprisingly for a racing game - but 18.2% were 10-14, and 28.2% were 15-19.
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(Which you might argue isn't great for selling VW Polos. But Schade says the company was delighted with the game's impact nonetheless).
Fishlabs' next iPhone advergame was Volkswagen Scirocco 24H Cup, which launched in June last year, and has so far been downloaded by more than 1.9 million people, and is still doing between 6,000 and 7,000 downloads a day.
Next, Fishlabs worked with Barclaycard on an iPhone game based on its Waterslide TV commercials.
"I was a total non-believer in this project to be honest," said Schade. "It was so casual - is it enough to have someone going left and right down a waterslide? I couldn't be more wrong!"
The game has now been downloaded more than 9.8 million times from the App Store, and is still racking up more than 45,000 downloads a day. At Christmas, it did more than a million after getting back into the App Store charts.
This is good news for Barclaycard - with three average play sessions of 1.33 minutes, it means 650,000 hours of brand engagement - the metric by which Barclaycard is judging success. Or at least one of them.
Schade had some advice for the audience at Mobile Games Forum. For developers, he pointed out that Fishlabs used existing assets and technology to create its advergames.
However, Schade said other handset makers can learn from this success. "We'd like to be on other smartphones with these games in the next year," he said. "Why shouldn't app store owners or operators sell deck placement to brands, and drive traffic with free ad games?"
Advergames are also an increasingly big part of Fishlabs' revenues.
"Last year, the revenue we got from ad games was about 30%, and we expect that to increase to 45% this year," said Schade. "It keeps us stable as a developer."
Do players care that these games are from Barclaycard or Volkswagen, though, as opposed to just seeing it as a good free game? Schade admitted it was a fair question, and said there could have been more Barclaycard branding in the game.
What's a valid range for the development of these games? Schade says the projects done by Fishlabs are in the "mid five-digit range, but the ones we are doing now are into the six-digits - and I'm not talking 100,000 [Euros, presumably]".
Fishlabs is doing these games for a flat fee - but is there the chance to ask for a bonus based on downloads? "We would love to, but right now it is fixed budgets," he says.
