Playing by instinct

In one of his old schoolbooks, Dan Milward wrote that he wanted “to make games for a living”. Looking back, he can’t remember writing it or even thinking it, but it’s not far from the truth. Milward is at the helm of Instinct, a whizz-bang creative agency in Wellington that is about to enter Asia’s saturated mobile content market. Milward has built a novel piece of software that allows anyone to design games for mobiles. It has the potential, some say, to become the YouTube of the gaming world.

Seven years ago, Milward conceived Instinct Entertainment as a traditional design agency that did marketing jobs for corporate clients. Before long, he’d grown tired of being a gun for hire. He wanted to devise games for mobiles, but found it difficult to convince anyone that old-school cellphone games had become trendy again. He tried to find collaboration partners in Asia, but those giants weren’t interested in just another service company that developed games and screensavers.

“I met mobile operators in China who said, ‘You don’t have enough content.’ They usually deal with developers that have large portfolios and make thousands of cellphone games. That was impossible for us to do.

“We had two options. One was to collaborate with lots of other mobile developers in New Zealand, but we found that no one was interested. The second option was to build software that let anybody create their own games. That’s the road we decided to go down, and now it’s paying off.”

The result is a Game Creator, a program that allows Joe or Joanne Average to go online, use drag-and-drop tools to build a game, and download it to their mobile. Milward says the software is a “complex little beast” that took over a year to refine. There is nothing like it on the market. Instinct launched a prototype of Game Creator on Facebook. Within two weeks, 200 game levels had been created by people who are largely unknown to Milward. The software’s popularity has grown by word of mouth.

“There are a whole lot of tiles, which you can use to create environments, like floors, trees and people. You can place them wherever you want on the screen. You can also include objects, place keys that will unlock doors, use ammunition, and fight against other characters. When you create one of these levels, it goes onto a database. Other people can play it, rate it, discuss it, duplicate it, change it or share it. Rather than guessing which games people want, we enable them to control the gaming universe.”

It’s the ultimate model of consumer sovereignty, and it sounds like fun for those of us who end up twiddling our thumbs on the bus or train each morning. But is there any money in Game Creator? Milward thinks so, but he accepts that strategic direction hasn’t been his strong point.

That’s about to change. Instinct has done a deal with Japan-based investor Terrie Lloyd, a Kiwi entrepreneur at the centre of Asia’s booming mobile content industry. Lloyd will launch Game Creator in Asia, and his Tokyo-based development agencies will help to smooth the path for Instinct.

Lloyd likens Instinct to Gree, the company that owns Japan’s second-largest social networking site. Gree went public last year, with a market value of US$1.8 billion. This year, Gree’s sales increased by 560%, and the firm expects a pre-tax profit of US$38.6 million. Gree has 7 million users. Lloyd hopes Game Creator will attract a million users within the next 12 months. If the software is popular, he reckons Instinct could generate about 5% of Gree’s profit next year: around US$1.9 million.