An interview with Brett Caird the Founder of 5th Cell Media. About 5TH Cell Media LLC. Founded in 2003, and led by Software Entertainment and Information Technology veterans Joseph M Tringali, Jeremiah Slaczka and Brett Caird, 5TH Cell is an independent developer of mobile, handheld and PC Casual entertainment software. 5TH Cell operates in both Bellevue Washington and Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, developing original content and working on top licenses in the mobile space. All products feature professional quality graphics, intuitive control schemes; instant action through comprehensible game systems and engaging session based game play. For more information please visit www.5thcell.com.
Brett took some time out to answer some questions for PVP:
1. Could you tell us a bit about 5th Cell Media and how it all started? 5TH Cell Media is an independent game developer. We started out in mobile games and have since moved on to developing on the Nintendo DS. The company was founded in 2003 in a modernised variation on the “garage” startup cliche. I was studying an MBA at the time, and was playing the beta of Shadowbane (Asia) in my spare time. As I already had one successful business under my belt, I found the MBA easy going so had plenty of time spare to put into playing and testing Shadowbane. I gained quite a profile in the game’s community, and the publisher noticed me too as I submitted roughly 25% of all bugs in the Asia-Pacific beta, which was more than the next 3 or 4 most prolific testers combined.I had an interest in getting into the gaming industry, so I put my resume in with the publisher. Really I didn’t expect anything to come of it since they were based in Hong Kong and I was in Australia and had no intention of relocating. As a successful entrepreneur and manager, its not like I was going to take an entry level QA job either. But thanks to the community manager at the publisher having gotten to know me and my skill set, when he moved on from there he approached me about partnering up with himself and some of his past associates to form 5TH Cell. My QA and commercial skills perfectly filled a hole in the management team he had been working on putting together.
The business operated virtually, with the management team spread around the globe - engaging contractors who were equally dispersed. It was more than 6 months after formation before I met my business partners face to face for the first time. With some blood, sweat and tears and a tiny trickle of capital we eventually managed to professionalise our operations and over time bring together most of the management team and operations to one office location. To this day however I still operate from Australia and we still engage some international contractors - even though the bulk of the management team and operations are now located in Seattle USA.
2. Could you tell us a bit about your DS title and its reception at E3? Where did you get the inspiration for such an amazing concept? Drawn to Life received less coverage than we would have liked at E3. The feedback its been getting generally has been positive, interestingly several reviewers have commented that they didn’t think we took the user created content angle far enough - which is amusing to us given how far ahead of anything else on the DS it is in this regard.
3. Could you tell us a bit about the mobile gaming market and your work in that area? Our experience in the market was not great. Our core competence as a company is making great original games, and we found this to be a complete mis-match with the way mobile games are marketed and distributed. Principally, brand names and IP are massive draw cards for people buying off a deck where the name of the game is the only information they have. And for low value purchases, people typically aren’t interested in doing research to ensure they are getting best possible value.
4. Pakistan will have over 50 million cell phone users soon. Do you think such subscribers in emerging markets with low Average Revenue Per User can be turned into a valid profit center by Service Providers using games? What role can companies like 5thcell Media play? I don’t see any reason why service providers cannot capitalise on this opportunity. As far as I can see there is no role for a company like 5TH Cell Media however. If the situation in the fully developed world is anything to go by, mobile games become licensed commodities and not outlets for creative operations - other than as a potential proving ground to build credibility and experience for an indepentent developer. We found that we made just as much money in developing markets as we did in established western markets with the games we did put to market. Low ARPU is nothing to lose sleep over when the volume of users is large enough. But in terms of game production, the key with mobile games lies in efficiency for porting operations and related logistics rather than creative flare. As a creative company we found this a drag.
5. How are development cycles different for handhelds and mobile phones? They are less different than you would think in terms of duration. While mobile is a 3 month theoretical development time, in practice with QA and porting and language certification it can end up taking the better part of a year from the first line of code until deployment. On DS the raw development time is much longer than 3 months (anywhere from 6 to 12), but because there is no porting, and certification processes are more mature and streamlined (you are working with an experienced publisher and a single vendor) all the incidental stuff is much faster. You can go from first line of code to deployment in just over a year, maybe under for a simple game that doesn’t do anything ground breaking or new. Obviously DS dev teams are larger also, but if you include the resources required to port for mobile - the teams aren’t that different in scale at the end of the day either.
6. Any chance to branch out to the nex gen consoles? Yes. We are interested in and exploring opportunities on next gen. Wii is the most compelling to us as we’re more interested in gameplay and fun factor than flash and sparkle. It is also more accessible in terms of budget. The fact that it is proving to be so massively successful as a platform in the market is icing on the cake.
7. Why on earth would you want to do this line of work? What keeps you going? I like games and I’m a perfectionist. The nature of my role allows me to work almost as a recluse (which I prefer), work in a field which I enjoy, and apply my skills to it. Like any job the work can be draining and frustrating, but the general backdrop of gaming provides more opportunities for enjoyment along the way I believe. 8. Did E3 really suck this year? Didn’t go, haven’t been for several years in fact. Not really convenient for me to get to the other side of the planet with a young family. This year we didn’t send anyone else either as we were all crunching like crazy to our final deadlines on Drawn to Life, so don’t really know much about how the new E3 went.
Habib “Noori Nath” Khan
There are Playstation 3’s sitting on retail shelves their cell processors gathering dust while Nintendo’s Wii’s are harder to find then true broadband connections in Pakistan. Xbox 360 is over a hundred titles and unlike those of the PSP a lot of them are actually playable. One PS3 is sold for every three Wii’s in Japan, formerly a market dominated by Sony. Japan is the second largest gaming market in the world after the US and X Box has never existed there and the 360 follows this discredited path with aplomb. More X Box Japan heads have been moved or fired then Prime Minister’s in PK-land.
I got a sneaky message on my mobile from my DSL provider. “Dear Max.com customer, your 512K dedicated connection has been upgraded to 1MB for free!” For free? In Pk-Land? What’s the catch? I am a Standard Chartered customer so I know more then anyone else about hidden charges. But it seems that broadband did get cheaper. Usually customers don’t get all the savings passed on but in this case with the decision of PTCL to cut all prices by 25% everyone is forced to follow suit.
Oh by the way R.E.S.P.E.C.T to Maxcom’s Customer Service. When their guy figured out that broadband was not working because my line was dead and there was a “pairing” problem in the telephone exchange he fixed everything just so the broadband could work. I love you guys man.
Whatever happened to Shera Jutt Pakistan’s first truly original 3D game?The guys over at Trango Interactive in Islamabad are a bunch of really talented people (Check out their concept art and 3D shots here: http://www.itrango.com/portfolio.html) who actually made a small but immensely playable and enjoyable game called Shera Jutt. I remember seeing it in Beta over a year ago and despite dated graphics I thought its play on popular Punjabi culture and the sheer originality rocked. There’s actually a scene where a massive buffalo charges at you as major boss and you defend your suddenly vulnerable self with nothing more then a gandasa.Well owing to go to market or business model issues or sheer letahrgy the game was never released in Pakistan. That’s a shame. Such a collaborative original effort should atleast have seen the light of day. Hell I would have released it for free just to get some publicity (After all how much does it cost to put in a CD with each copy of The Daily Times?). I bet you just that stunt would have built a pipeline of local orders to book their developers for two years straight. If you are listening Trango dudes – You can still do it. Or just lend it to us and we will put it up for a free download on p-v-p.com.
I am generally fascinated by “the secret sauce” that few studios understand of creating Intellectual Property or IP. How to breakthrough the clutter of creativity and make something that really resonates and breaks out into the mass cultural consciousness. Bungie did that with Halo, Blizzard do it with everything they touch! This is a big deal. That is why Microsoft boughtthe Halo IP. It could not create it despite having billions. Secret sauce baby. Only someone else’s mama knows how to make it.Halo 3 what we expected it to do. It broke the record for any entertainment launch in history. Yes boys and girls it brought more in its first day then Return of the Sith on its launch.At stake are billions of dollars from merchandise deals, additional games and additional media content. What Halo needs to do in order to become the next Star Wars is to become a franchise that can bring money in just by the mention of its name. I think the first test will be Halo Wars. While you are staying in the field of games you are moving from the FPS genre to RTS. It’s a big move in a field with the memory of giants like Westwood still casting a pall on it and with current kings Blizzard etc. dominating. This is a good test to see if Halo can become a franchise. Runaway success for Halo Wars means that Halo has juice as a franchise.
