Interview: Why Spry Fox Chose Kindle Over iOS

As the rush to develop the next big hit game for Apple's App Store continues, indie game developer Spry Fox has taken an alternate route. This month, the studio released Triple Town, its first game for Amazon's Kindle e-reader. Daniel Cook, who recently co-founded Kirkland, WA-based Spry Fox with fellow ex-Microsoft employee David Edery, told Gamasutra that the Kindle's large installed base and relative lack of competition were factors in choosing to release the $2.99 puzzle game on the device. "The Kindle has an established population of customers who like to buy things," said Cook, who's chief creative officer at Spry Fox. "But those customers don't have a lot of games to buy. When there is a high demand and low supply, you've got the makings of an interesting opportunity." Cook added, "We've seen this pattern again and again with Xbox Live Arcade and even the iPhone: If you can get a product launched during the first wave, there is a chance to create a breakout hit." He added: "iOS is still interesting, but it is a far more mature market with greater competition. It requires a different class of product to succeed there." Such windows of opportunity are short-lived, Cook said. Once platform holders begin to realize the commercial viability of a given market, doors begin to close. Cook explained, "Eventually the market becomes crowded with content, larger publishers start playing politics and it is harder for a small developer to get a slot on the marketing schedule." He continued, "For example, the opportunity for smaller developers has pretty much closed off in the console market. We may never again see another World of Goo or Braid-class hit developed and owned by an indie." "Once the initial market is seeded and its profit potential proven, you typically need a tie and a well greased palm to get past the now-powerful gatekeepers," Cook said. "This is the way that markets evolve. As a smart developer, you need to be creating the next opportunity, not mooning after the successes that happened two years ago." The development of Triple Town took just four weeks, from the end of March this year to the end of April. Most of the time was spent play-testing and polishing, according to Cook, who said Spry Fox chose to "limit the scope" of the game so it could hit the desired launch window this month. Amazon opened up the device to developers in January this year. Spry Fox describes Triple Town as an "original and unusually deep puzzle game" that has players matching game pieces in order to build a city. Co-founder Edery said on his Game Tycoon blog that play-testers described the game as "the Civilization of match-three games" -- a notion that Edery jokingly said is "both flattering and terrifying." The game is earning mostly perfect 5-our-of-5 scores from 15 user reviews currently on Amazon.com, where it's currently in the Top 10 of all paid books and applications in the Kindle Store. Electronic Arts' Solitaire is currently in the number one selling spot, which was previously occupied by a Kindle port of the EA's Scrabble. "When you deal with new markets, it really isn't about paying your dues, satisfying genre conventions or spending millions of dollars on marketing," Cook said. "Instead it is about making a great game for the audience at hand." Spry Fox is looking at targeting other markets aside from Kindle's bookworm audience, namely the Flash game market. "When there is a low cost, low competition opportunity where we can release a high value, highly differentiated game, that's when I get excited. All this is why three of our other games are targeting free-to-play Flash games," said Cook. The studio naturally hopes Triple Town's sales will pay for the game's development and net some profit for the team. For Cook, "Every original game with a price tag is both a commercial experiment and a design experiment. You take a risk on a bright opportunity, you create something great within the constraints, and then you see where the chips fall. Hopefully you learn something in the process." [Cook and Edery maintain blogs worth following at Lost Garden and Game Tycoon.]