Neon Play

Neon Play

A gaming sensation
Founder: Oli Christie



Age of founder: 39
Background: Copywriter/creative director
Founded in: 2010, UK
Headquarters: Cirencester, UK
Business type: Mobile gaming



A

s a student, Oli Christie had a dream: to forge a successful career in the advertising industry. After a slow start in the industry, Oli eventually got his ideal job as a creative director of an online ad agency, where he became increasingly focused on developing simple, addictive Flash games.

When he saw the growing popularity of the iPhone and the opportunities it represented, he took the cue to leave the comfort and prestige of his advertising work and use his knack for creating addictive games to make his fortune on the new platform.


Despite starting with minimal investment and no employees, office or experience, within 20 months Oli had created one of the fastest-growing mobile app developers in the UK, with 60 apps across all platforms and 11 different games that have received more than a million downloads. An example of getting things right in a boom industry, Neon Play's story is one of being in the right place at the right time.


First business


Armed with a degree in psychology and sociology from Exeter University, Oli's aim was to enter the world of advertising as a copywriter, but he found it difficult to break into the industry as a graduate. Instead, he decided to make his own way in the world whilst waiting for an opportunity to come up.


'You should always try and get experience yourself in other people's companies before you start your own. Learn on their behalf rather than making your own expensive mistakes.'





In the early 1990s Oli started his first business, Action Stationery. Action Stationery sold letterheaded paper with 52 different designs featuring famous cartoon characters to various outlets such as Office World. The business really took off, but Oli shut it down after four years as it was not making enough money to survive. 'In hindsight it was a mistake, because I knew nothing about running a business really – I knew nothing about stationery or retail', says Oli. 'But it was a good learning experience in one respect.' Now he believes 'you should always try and get experience yourself in other people's companies before you start your own. Learn on their behalf rather than making your own expensive mistakes.'


Picking himself up after the disappointment of Action Stationery, Oli decided it was time to have another go at entering the advertising industry, starting a job as an account manager at a niche marketing company as a way to get his foot on the rung. However, despite working with increasingly high-profile clients such as Abbey National and the Royal Mail, his desire to write copy remained. He began putting together a portfolio of his own 'stick drawings and headlines' to show to potential employers. Despite the portfolio being 'very shoddy' by Oli's own admission, he managed to land himself a job as a junior copywriter at marketing company Billington Cartmell in 1999.


At Billington Cartmell Oli was responsible for writing the copy on sales promotions, direct mail and advertisements for some major brands and it seemed he had found his dream job at last. 'I absolutely loved it', Oli says of his time there. 'I was writing all the headlines on packs of Hula Hoops and cans of Coke – we were working for some awesome brands. It was an exciting time.'


Despite enjoying the excitement and security of his job as a copywriter, an opportunity soon came along which Oli couldn't refuse. A friend of a friend had started his own online marketing agency, Panlogic, and asked Oli to join the nascent company as Creative Director – a huge promotion. 'The internet was probably responsible for accelerating my career by five to 10 years', says Oli. So, in May 2000, Oli joined the burgeoning company.


Splat the Mp


Panlogic started out producing internet banner advertising and website design for its clients, but Oli and his colleagues soon noticed that a new phenomenon – online Flash games – was sweeping the internet, and they saw an opportunity to develop simple, free-to-play games for clients as another form of viral marketing. But before they could offer this service, they needed to learn how to use the technology themselves, so decided to develop a 'test' game to become familiar with the development tools. 'The general election [of 2001] was coming up and we had a brainstorm – and asked "what happens during elections?" One idea was that people chuck eggs at politicians', says Oli. They set about developing a simple game, Splat the MP, set in the Houses of Parliament where the player threw eggs at cut-outs of various MPs and public figures of the time.


'The game went completely and utterly ballistic – I think it ended up being the most viral game of that year.'





The timing of the game's launch was nothing other than serendipitous. On 16 May 2001, hours before they were to release the game, prominent Labour MP John Prescott was involved in an incident in which he punched a protestor who had thrown an egg at him. The Panlogic team spotted an opportunity, and promptly added a John Prescott character to the game, complete with an animated fist punching the screen when the player landed a hit. 'We launched it literally hours after Prescott had punched this guy', remembers Oli. 'The game went completely and utterly ballistic – I think it ended up being the most viral game of that year.'


By the evening of launch day, Oli and the Panlogic team were appearing on international news outlets around the world, and their game would be played by over 10 million people in the following week. 'It was incredibly fortunate – a case of being in the right place at the right time', says Oli. 'But what it did is it showed us the power of viral.'


The success of Splat the MP gave Panlogic a headline-grabbing platform from which to demonstrate their competence in the world of online games. Soon, they were the leading viral marketing agency in the UK, and Oli was overseeing the development of Flash games for the likes of the BBC and lastminute.com. One of Oli's creations at this time was a game entitled Boring Boring Boring – where the player attempts to throw balls of paper into a bin from varying distances. Later, the iPhone game Paper Toss appeared to liberally 'borrow' nearly all Boring Boring Boring's gameplay elements – something that Oli says he is 'upset but not bitter' about. 'It's good to know that it's become one of the most successful iPhone games of all time', he says of Paper Toss.


Going it alone


During his time at Panlogic, Oli got married and had his first child – and after five years at the company he felt it was time to move closer to home. A fan of the rolling Cotswold hills, Oli was finding it increasingly difficult to juggle a full-time job in London with a wife and child in Gloucestershire. In 2005 he left Panlogic to join locally based email marketing firm Inbox Digital (now renamed 20:20) as their new Creative Director. He brought his nous and expertise in the world of online games into Inbox's repertoire and helped the company usurp his old employers Panlogic as the most successful viral games agency in Europe, overseeing the development of numerous successful 'advergames' for multinational clients such as 3M, Gillette and Panasonic. His growing prestige in the emerging category of viral marketing led to numerous awards, including Best Game in the 2007 NMA Effectiveness awards and Best Viral Campaign in the 2006 YDA awards.


Despite his success and firmly established reputation as an online marketing guru, after six years at Inbox Oli began to spot some deficiencies in the business model. 'When we built a game for a client we were charging them between £20,000 and £50,000', he explains. 'And that was completely capped – whether we got one hit or 10 million hits (and a lot of our games did get 10 million hits), we were never going to earn more than our fee.'


He also saw the rise of a new and exciting platform in the growing smartphone industry – and Apple's offerings in particular. 'When the iPhone came along [in 2007] everyone was reading all these stories about people making a fortune out of very simple, casual games', he recalls. 'I thought to myself "Well, I'm making these simple games – and I'm also working for somebody else, so not getting anything more than my basic salary." So I saw an opportunity to create my own games and sell them myself, and if I sold hundreds or thousands or millions, then I'd get rewarded for that success in the recurring revenue.'


'I knew how to make a game and it was just a matter of believing in yourself and going for it.'





Spurred on by this ambition, Oli took the bold step of leaving his safe post at Inbox in May 2010 to start his own iPhone app development company – a decision he admits was 'absolutely terrifying'. 'My wife had just had our third child, and she obviously wasn't totally over the moon with me quitting a good salary and starting a new company with all the stress that entails', he says. 'But I believed in it – you could see that there was going to be a boom in smartphones and games were going to be a big part of that. I knew how to make a game and it was just a matter of believing in yourself and going for it.'


The first game


Oli founded Neon Play in Spring 2010, with an investment of £40,000 taken from his own savings. It was started in his kitchen, with little more than a book of around 100 ideas for simple, addictive, low-cost mobile games that he had written on holiday. Before the company could get going, however, Oli had to surmount one major obstacle; he had no idea how to actually program a game. 'I'm a complete technophobe, sadly', he admits. 'My skill in games is in the ideas and project management.'


So he put out an advertisement online for a technical director and partner for the young business, describing the job as the 'opportunity of a lifetime'. He only received one reply, from a developer called Mark Allen, who was working at console giant Midway in the USA but wished, fortuitously, to come back and live in the Cotswolds. Mark had turned down a job at a much larger games company to come and work with Oli, also recognising the huge potential in mobile gaming start-ups. The two got on famously and became business partners. 'I had my small game experience, and he had his big game experience in the console industry, working for Midway and Acclaim and making games such as Crazy Taxi and Mortal Kombat', says Oli. 'It was a perfect mix of skills.' successful games for Neon Play.


The pair set out picking an idea for Neon Play's first game from Oli's book. 'It was about April or May 2010, and the World Cup was in June, so we thought "let's do a football game'", he recalls. The idea for the game, Flick Football, was appealing in its simplicity – the user would use their finger to 'flick' a football around a wall of defenders and into a goal.


Soon into development, Oli and Mark realised such a game would require more skills than the pair of them possessed and they recruited a team of five freelancers to work on various aspects – a designer who took care of the look and feel of the game menus, two 3D experts who modelled the stadium and the animations of the footballers, an audio technician who worked on the game sounds and a commentator to provide the in-game voice-overs. 'Mark and I were in my kitchen and all the freelancers were working remotely, so it was all by phone and email', he explains. 'It was quite tricky to co-ordinate, but we managed it in the end.' at Neon Play.


Flick Football was released on the iPhone App Store in June for an initial price of 59p (of which 70% went to the company with the other 30% going to Apple and Google), with a free Lite version also released to entice consumers to buy the full game. Soon after launch, it became apparent that Oli's remarkable knack for being in the right place at the right time would reappear. The world was in the grip of World Cup fever, and Flick Football's simple, addictive gameplay and appealing design aesthetic was perfectly placed to take advantage of this. Straight from release, Flick Football shot up the charts into the top 10 paid apps on the Apple App Store globally, and Neon Play was already in profit within a few weeks. 'It was the perfect storm, really', admits Oli.


The success of Flick Football enabled Neon Play to immediately hire two more staff (another programmer and an artist/3D modeller) and move into their first office, a small rented room in the local town of Cirencester. Neon Play now had a real development team, with Oli overseeing the project management and taking care of the marketing and in-game copy.


Bringing home the bacon


Despite the success of their first app, in the first few months Oli pursued a business model with a healthy dose of realism, not wishing to rely entirely on their own offerings in case the follow-ups to Flick Football were less successful. One additional source of revenue in the early days was client work, making branded apps that the company was paid a flat fee for; similar to what he had been doing at Inbox and Panlogic. 'I didn't really want to do it, because I'd spent 20 years working for clients and I was a bit sick of it, to be honest', he admits. 'But the client and agency work did help pay the bills in the initial months.'


Another opportunity to bring in revenue that Oli spotted was licensed children's games – he saw potential in the children's market, especially on the newly released iPad, and Neon Play set about approaching rights holders to obtain licences for children's shows on a revenue share model. Two franchises have enjoyed particular success – Cartoon Networks' Ben 10 and Channel 5's Little Princess, and Oli says it wasn't hard to convince these relatively big names to partner up with Neon Play. 'I think my viral games experience and our mobile games success and distribution platform made us a logical partner for these big companies', he explains. 'They really seemed to want to work with us.'


The 10 billion dollar question


One of the company's nine offerings at the beginning of 2011 was Paper Glider, another game with a simple but effective premise. The user would swipe the screen to send a paper plane into flight and had to keep it in the air as long as possible.


Paper Glider was a runaway success for Neon Play, charting at number one on the UK app sales chart and number two in the USA at the beginning of 2011. But another piece of astounding good luck helped this success turn stratospheric. On 22 January 2011, Oli received a call from an Apple employee informing him that that morning, Gail Davies of Kent had downloaded Paper Glider – making it Apple's 10 billionth download from the App Store. The lucky downloader received a $10,000 (£6,200) iTunes gift card, and Oli and his company reaped the rewards of the enormous media coverage. 'We'd peaked at the perfect time in the charts anyway', he says, 'but what it did was help put Neon Play on the map – suddenly we were on global news, because obviously it was a big news story for Apple to have reached that milestone.'


Oli received a call from an Apple employee informing him that that morning, Gail Davies of Kent had downloaded Paper Glider – making it Apple's 10 billionth download from the App Store.





The company wasted no time in exploiting this fortune, taking advantage of the press and TV coverage to full effect and expanding the range of Paper Glider games, developing new offerings such as Paper Glider Para Drop, Paper Glider Bomber and Paper Glider Crazy Copter. 'The Paper Glider game series have had 13 million downloads between them; it's been our most successful IP', says Oli. 'We got very lucky.'


In November 2010, Neon Play began experimenting with the latest trend in the industry, beginning to move their offerings from a paid to a 'freemium' model – where the user downloads the application for free but is given the option of paying for in-game upgrades or new features. ‘What [freemium] enables us to do is to break down the barriers to entry for people to play it, and then within the game there’s advertising, which helps us to get some revenue, but also in-app purchases to keep people playing’, explains Oli.





Paper Glider took Neon Play to a new level in the gaming world.


Neon Play is constantly changing its business model to adapt to the rapidly shifting needs of the industry.





They have recently branched out into releasing games for Android devices, a move which comes with its own unique challenges for the company. ‘The classic Android user is not somebody who wants [freemium] enables us to do is to break down the barriers to entry for people to play it, and then within the game there’s advertising, which helps us to get some revenue, but also in-app purchases to keep people playing’, explains Oli.





Paper Glider took Neon Play to a new level in the gaming world.


Neon Play is constantly changing its business model to adapt to the rapidly shifting needs of the industry.





They have recently branched out into releasing games for Android devices, a move which comes with its own unique challenges for the company. ‘The classic Android user is not somebody who wants [freemium] enables us to do is to break down the barriers to entry for people to play it, and then within the game there’s advertising, which helps us to get some revenue, but also in-app purchases to keep people playing’, explains Oli.





Paper Glider took Neon Play to a new level in the gaming world.


Neon Play is constantly changing its business model to adapt to the rapidly shifting needs of the industry.





They have recently branched out into releasing games for Android devices, a move which comes with its own unique challenges for the company. ‘The classic Android user is not somebody who wants to pay for stuff; they’re more freebie merchants, so there’s a challenge from a monetisation point of view’, Oli says. ‘There’s also the issue of the fragmentation of the market, because there are so many different handsets and app stores – from a developer’s point of view it’s a bit of a nightmare really.’


But Neon Play is constantly changing its business model to adapt to the rapidly shifting needs of the industry. Oli says the studio’s relatively small size has helped them in this regard. ‘If we do a game, and halfway through we think “you know what, this isn’t much fun” we can bin it very easily’, he explains. ‘Because we’re smaller, we can change and pivot more quickly as a company – it’s like moving a speedboat as opposed to an oil tanker.’



Where are they now?


Neon Play continues to enjoy success, with the company hitting the milestone of 30 million downloads across all their apps in 2012 – a fantastic achievement over just 20 months of existence. They have expanded their operation to 15 employees and have recently moved into a stunning new open-plan studio in Cirencester. The company’s success has not gone unnoticed by the industry, and Neon Play won 10 industry awards in its first 20 months. Oli himself picked up the gong of the Chamber of Commerce’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2011 and Neon Play became the Start-up of the Year in the Nectar Business Awards.


Neon Play also has plans to eventually become a publishing as well as a development company, using their own exposure and loyal network of users to help developers launch their own games. One such game, Jumbled, has already been released; but Oli admits the process is one in which they are taking ‘baby steps’. ‘Our main focus is creating our own games’, he says. ‘Because we retain 100% of the revenue. We’re not pushing it too hard until we become a bit bigger.’


One other thing Oli has learned is the value that PR can give to a small company. ‘It’s been massive’, he admits. ‘I think we’re lucky that we’re in a boom industry so people want to know about us; but we’ve always been very conscious that through PR you can get a lot of cheap and often free exposure and that has really helped us grow.’