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The casual game player on social networks like Facebook is a growing part of the future of gaming, according to Blue Fang Games LLC. And that is why the Waltham company — best known for the Zoo Tycoon franchise — has just released a Facebook game called Zoo Kingdom.
That makes Blue Fang the first traditional game development studio to port its intellectual property to a social site like Facebook, COO Scott Triola said.
Blue Fang, however, has no intention of stopping development of games for the PC or for game consoles like the Xbox 360, said Triola.
“To be clear, we are still in the console business — we believe in the long term it is still a viable business model,” he said, noting that mobile and social games will be just another part of the mix. “It’s just an additional revenue stream that can be used to support the business.”
According to Triola, the largest block of people playing Zoo Tycoon historically has been the casual game players, not the “hardcore” players of first person shooters such as Call of Duty. Given that those gamers are becoming the primary players of such popular Facebook games as Mafia Wars and Farmville, it seemed like the writing was on the wall for Blue Fang. Well, that and the low cost to develop such games.
“The ability to create and launch a game direct to consumers in a reasonable time frame with a level of resources we can self-fund makes this very attractive to us,” Triola said. “That was something that wasn’t available to us.”
The traditional model that Blue Fang used with the Zoo Tycoon games was to get a publisher that would invest in the upfront costs of development, and Blue Fang would serve simply as the creative studio.
For example, Microsoft Corp.’s Microsoft Game Studios division published Zoo Tycoon 2.
“In that model you have basically a publisher providing the capital to develop these games which could take millions of dollars and you launch and then you are out looking for the capital for your next project,” Triola said.
While the games are free to play on Facebook, the money comes from players purchasing in game items to enhance their game experience with real money. And that can be very lucrative. Both Farmville and Mafia Wars are made by San Francisco studio Zynga, which was founded solely to develop games for social sites. According to recent estimates, the 800-employee Zynga would be worth at least $2.5 billion if it were publicly traded.
Blue Fang may have been given a push toward the social game development space in November of 2008 when the company’s then-senior designer, industry veteran Steve Meretzky, left to move to the West Coast and join Playdom, the maker of some of the most popular games at the time on Myspace.
Triola would not state whether or not private Blue Fang was profitable, but he did say that the revenue from its previous games has allowed the company to stay at a staff level of about 30 people for a few years now. The company, founded in 1998, has also only taken a single round of outside funding, an undisclosed amount from Boston’s Massachusetts Capital Resource Co. in 2006.
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