Interview: Oceanhouse Media

CG.biz: What motivated you to form Oceanhouse Media?

Michel Kripalani: I am an entrepreneur at heart and this is my third start-up. After running Presto Studios for 11 years, I really fell in love with development and working day-in and day-out with creative folks. Presto Studios was built on the wave that formed when CD-ROMs were first introduced in 1990. It was one of the first companies to ship games that could only fit on a CD.

By the fall of 2008, it was very clear to me that a similar wave was forming around the iPhone app market. As the wave slowly grew through winter of 2008 I found myself really itching to jump in. In January of 2009, my former employer and I parted ways. The very next day I founded Oceanhouse Media.

Previously Oceanhouse Media had tended to stick to developing non-gaming apps. Why was that?

Games sales represent a large portion of total App Store revenue, but it is also a very crowded, hyper-competitive category. Rather than immediately throw our hat in the ring with all of the other game developers, we decided to build a financial foundation using the best apps that we could regardless of category. Our goal was to produce lots of high quality apps… fast.

The end result was that Oceanhouse Media became highly diversified with its product offering. At any given time we found ourselves with 12-16 different apps on Top-100 lists on the App Store. We’ve had Top-100 apps in the Games, Music, Photography, Books, Health & Fitness, Reference and Finance categories. In fact, in the span of just one month, we held the number-one spot in both Finance and Kids Games. There is good money to be made as the number-one Kids Game, but there is also good money to be made with the number-one Finance app. Think about it like diversifying a stock portfolio.

And why have you started game development now?

As soon as we landed the Dr. Seuss license we realised that we needed to get back into games. It was not a difficult decision. We will certainly develop e-books and other sorts of fun apps using the Dr. Seuss materials, but games were a no-brainer as part of the overall app catalogue.

Dr Seuss must be superb IP to work with. Do you have more plans for the infamous characters from the original books?

In a word, ‘yes’. We have signed a multi-year deal that gives us access to many fantastic properties. You can expect to see many, diverse apps based on the Dr. Seuss materials coming from Oceanhouse Media over the next few years.

Is Oceanhouse Media planning to continue to pursue the development of gaming titles, outside of the Dr Seuss IP? Perhaps there’s plans or more licensed product or even original IP?

I don’t expect that we will develop much original IP. With 100,000 apps in the App Store, I personally believe that it will become increasingly difficult for original content to get to the top of the charts. Sure. It will happen. There will be breakthrough titles that are completely original. But there will also be a wasteland filled with really great original apps that never got any visibility. I’ve built a lot of original IP over the years (The Journeyman Project series, Whacked!) and I’ve also built games on licensed IP (Myst, Star Trek, Gundam, Stephen King). Given the rate at which the app market is getting saturated, I’ve got my money on the licensed IP.

You've created a huge amount of titles in a relatively short time. What is the secret to producing a quantity of output without sacrificing quality?

We don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel every time we ship an app. Too many developers will re-write from the ground up for each new app. On the contrary, we have a handful of really solid engines that we try to re-purpose as much as possible. Also, we like to start with great content that people already love. This provides a built-in fan base. And finally, truth be told, I work with a bunch of detail-oriented nitpickers. You’d be surprised at the level of detail that we obsess over. And if we don’t get it right in a shipping app, we will quickly submit an update that solves the problem.

How has Oceanhouse Media's experience creating non-gaming titles helped now that you are embracing game development?

We shipped 67 non-game apps before we shipped our first game. Most of this was done in the span of 6 months. So, there are parts of our machine that are very well oiled. We have a small core team that focus on publishing-related matters and a large group of contractors that we tap into. When we received the “green light” from Dr. Seuss we were up and running in days, not weeks or months. Additionally, we have a lot of experience with Apple’s approval process and we know how to avoid many of the ‘gotchas.’ We have solid PR and marketing systems in place and we’ve been able to experiment with pricing models.

Coming back to my comment on contractors, I want to mention that Grinchmas was co-developed with Limbic Software, the team behind the massive hit TowerMadness. Now that Grinchmas joins TowerMadness on the Top-100 charts, they may be one of the few dev teams that have ever had two simultaneous apps on the Top-100 chart. They were great to work with.

And what of the obstacles in terms of the move to games development?

Actually, the transition to games was pretty smooth. It was like pulling on an old pair of shoes that always fit well. We fell right back into the groove and just started doing what we’d been doing for 11 years at Presto Studios. There were no major obstacles.

What other expansion plans does Oceanhouse have?

Well, with regards to our current licenses, we certainly have big plans for Dr. Seuss apps. We’ve just submitted our first e-book. It is an adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! I love it. I can’t wait for Apple to approve it. Beyond that, we are always open to other license partners. It will be interesting to see what doors open up for us over the next 6-12 months.

What do you see as the biggest challenges currently facing the casual gaming sector?

I see the market as being flooded with product. I see horrible pricing problems with lots of downward pressure. There is an overall lack of consistent quality across the full spectrum of casual games. Free games with micro-transactions are going to make an already price sensitive market even more price sensitive. In some ways, it’s the wild wild west out there.

To end on a more positive note, what excites you most about the future of game development?

I love the way that games can be updated, built-upon and expanded in a matter of weeks (or even days) using the iPhone/App Store model. You can ship a product with a limited architecture and see if it strikes a nerve before committing too much to development. And once you have something that fills a void, look out! You can iterate and iterate at an insane speed with your customers almost being part of the process. That’s one thing that we are really looking forward to with Grinchmas. We see this game being a very basic “shell” if you will of something that can be so much more. Now that it’s screaming up the charts the team is already churning away with ideas of how to expand upon what we already have.