October has been an insane month for Spry Fox. First we launched Triple Town. Then we launched Steambirds: Survival, mobile edition. Now I’m pleased to announce the launch of our latest original game, Panda Poet for the Web, a total remake of our original Kindle game which was released in 2010!
For a limited time, Panda Poet is available exclusively on our website and the Chrome Web Store.
The Kindle version of Panda Poet is a single-player word puzzle game, but the Web-based version is focused on asychronous multiplayer, and the core gameplay mechanic has been completely revamped to accomodate that. The quickest description of the new Panda Poet is “Scrabble meets Go.” It is a battle for territory between two players, and words are your weapons.
Panda Poet is also our first HTML5 game, which is an interesting experiment for us. We’re looking forward to seeing how we can leverage some of the big platforms that have recently begun to emphasize HTML5 games and comparing the traffic they drive to the traffic provided by Flash game portals, our traditional bread and butter. And we’re curious to see how browser compatability issues affect our retention, if at all. One thing’s for sure: its exciting to fire up the browser on my phone and play Panda Poet on it without any major issues. 🙂
As always, we’ve launched what we consider to be the “minimum viable product” and we expect to keep improving the game over time. Four months from now, Panda Poet will look very different. And of course, we plan to put it on social networks and mobile devices, so there is a huge amount of work to be done.
The current business model is simple: Pay $2.99 to disable advertisements and enable the option to play on a 9×9 board in addition to default 7×7 board. My guess is that this won’t be enough to provide the kind of ARPU we are shooting for, but it will hopefully provided a decent baseline that we can build off of. Of course, we expect to generate some revenue from the advertisements itself, but it is hard to imagine that being very significant unless Panda Poet becomes a monster hit. That’s just not something anyone can bet on.
So anyway, please check out Panda Poet and let me know what you think! I will post an update in a few months on the game’s performance. (Speaking of, I’m overdue for an update on our other games. I’ll try to post something in a few weeks.)
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