Tricky Software Pulls Off the Mac/PC Balancing Act
Jun 1st, 2009 by admin
When Tricky Software founder Zachary Waibel bid EA a fond farewell to strike out on his own, he decided his new company would focus on making games for both PCs and the Mac platform. It was a somewhat unusual decision, but it felt perfectly natural to Waibel, a longtime Mac user. The choice to keep Mac in the picture presented a big opportunity down the road, when iPhone games really took off.
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For some developers, working for a multi-billion dollar game powerhouse with lots of resources would be a heavenly prospect. That wasn't the case, though, for Zachary Waibel.
Waibel is the founder and president of Tricky Software, of Menlo Park, Calif., a maker of games like "Armado" and "Spore Origins" for Macintosh and Windows computers, as well as devices like the iPhone and iPod.
However, in 1999, he was working on console games for the giant Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS) and feeling less than fulfilled.
"I love Electronic Arts," he told MacNewsWorld. "I learned a lot there. But in console games, it was normal to have team sizes in the 80 to 120 range. I wanted to do something where the team sizes were smaller."
EA has 9,000 employees. Tricky has an average of 12 employees, including contractors.
Moreover, Waibel felt the time was right to start a new business.
"I really felt that the downloading of digital content was coming of age," he said. "I could see that on the horizon, and I thought there wouldn't be another opportunity like that for small developers."
While the vicissitudes of starting a new company have pressured many a business pup to push products out the door prematurely, Waibel wasn't one of them.
"The first thing we did was build an engine that worked on the Mac and the PC," he explained. "We built a lot of tools and a lot of technology."
Going the dual platform route was a bit unusual, he noted.
Most game makers stuck strictly to the Windows side of the fence, "but I'd been working on a Mac since I was 11 years old, and I just grew up with it," he said.
The influence of that early experience with the computer "for the rest of us" and his parents' design business influenced Waibel when he founded Tricky.
For instance, the company's mission statement proclaims, "We consider the art and design very critical to our approach."
"Game design may be more critical than art," he noted, "but I enjoy making something look nice. It's something that I personally like to do."
Although he didn't know it at the time, the weeks spent developing that dual platform engine paid dividends for Waibel and company in the future.
"It's been a huge plus for us," Waibel declared, "because we discovered we had an engine that works almost without modification on the iPhone."
The iPhone and the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) App Store have been a boon for game developers like Tricky, according to Tuncer Deniz, publisher of Inside Mac Games in Hutto, Texas.
"The App Store makes it so easy to purchase games right through the phone no matter where you are," he told MacNewsWorld. "The App Store is a killer app."
Pricing, too, has contributed to the popularity of iPhone games. While pricing varies, many of these digital diversions are only 99 US cents.
Tuncer cited an early iPhone game developer who initially marketed his lineup at US$9.99. However, as competition increased, he took the radical move of slashing prices to 99 cents.
"That's when he saw a huge surge in sales," he said. "Downloading a game became a no-brainer for people."
"It's not unheard of to have games at 99 cents sell a million, 2 million copies," he added.
Cashing in on that kind of gold mine, though, can be challenging.
"The iPhone is a wonderful machine, but it's not extremely powerful, so you're always having to scale back your ideas," Tricky's Waibel conceded.
"When we brought 'Amado,' which was written for the PC and the Mac, to the iPhone, we had to make lots and lots of modifications," he added.
Looking to the future, he said that iPhone games will continue to play a big role in Tricky's product line.
"That's become a good market for us to be in," he observed.
"But we don't believe the PC/Mac market, especially on the casual side, is dead by any means," he added. "So we want to keep that alive as well."
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