This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Tall and broad-shouldered, Riccardo Zacconi is softly spoken and his English has a slight Italian inflection. As of December, his decade-old casual-gaming company, King, had over 280 million unique monthly users, up from fewer than 50 million a year before. King's biggest game, Candy Crush Saga, is Facebook's most popular, with two others, Pet Rescue Saga and Farm Heroes Saga, closely behind.
The company is privately held, so doesn't have to release accounts, but in early 2013 analysts estimated that it had a turnover of around £300m.
Unclear about his next step after completing an economics degree in Rome, Zacconi turned to management consultancy, which allowed him "to keep doors open, look around". In 1998, he took the leap into technology: somebody needed to help "the user in their journey through the internet," he says: "The potential was all with the portal." Zacconi became the chief executive of Spray Network, a German company that was attempting to become a European Yahoo!, MSN or AOL. Zacconi -- and the team that would later start King -- tried to take the company public in less than 18 months, at the height of the dotcom bubble. Spray was plagued by shifting goals: financial analysts asked for page impressions, then revenues.
Within three months, they demanded profits. When the bubble burst, Spray almost folded. "We learned a lot," Zacconi says. "We learned to use healthy economic principles." King's growth has been steady: founded in 2003, King moved into profit in 2005, and is only now approaching 800 employees. Backed by €34m in venture funding from Apex and Index Ventures, its casual, "bite-sized" gaming has displaced the resource-management games that once dominated the social sector. In early 2010 Zynga's Farmville was dominant, with nine resource-management games (not all Zynga's) making up Facebook's top ten. Now King's simpler, quicker, easy-to-learn but difficult-to-master games lead the way.
The company is built on three platforms. New games, built in no more than three months by three people, are launched on King.com, through which King's heavy players test them. With enough hits, a game moves to Facebook. Of King.com's more than 175 games, six are now there. According to Zacconi, King is in a "hit-driven business". Games are put on mobile only once they've been successful on Facebook. It's a process that allows the company to fail fast and fail cheap. Zacconi dismisses comparisons with Finnish rival Supercell. He sees King as "unique". "They
[Supercell] have deeper games and more people [producing them]."
The turning point for the business came in 2010. King was still operating through Yahoo!, rather than Facebook. In April of that year, Zacconi realised King would not stay afloat if it stayed on Yahoo! --the portal had lost 45 per cent of its gaming traffic in 12 months. "What we identified was that all the players playing resource-management games were our target group -- 60 to 70 per cent were female, [aged] 25 plus. All the games we had developed over the past ten years were perfectly suited for them. So we said,
'Let's bring these games to [them on] Facebook.'" At the same time, King.com modified its single-level, win-lose games, to create "progressive" games, with hundreds of levels, allowing players to compete with friends over a long period of time.
Moving to Facebook and iterating the games was not the only call Zacconi got right: he prioritised the syncing of games across devices, making them playable anywhere. "It's a connected world... you may start on a computer and then be on a commute, and then be in front of a TV with your iPad," he says. "People have ten minutes here, five minutes there." In 2013 he ceased all advertising within games. "We're focused on having a pure experience, and we don't want to distract the user," Zacconi says. The company is now solely reliant on freemium, with all games free to download and players paying only to continue levels.
As for King's future, he is coy about rumours of an IPO. "It's a potential option... it's a shareholder call," he says. Does he fear the same public pressures that helped derail Spray? "The first thing is the business. If the business is good, telling the story is easy." He uses the same sentiment to describe expansion into Asia, with Japan the first target. "The casual-games genre was invented in Japan in the 70s." He will be joining a competitive market. Supercell was recently bought by the owner of Japanese game-maker GungHo. If King does become the flagship exit London is looking for, Zacconi is certain of one thing. "The business always comes first -- that's one of the key lessons from Spray... Companies that go after quarterly results rather than long-term results, it will always catch up."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
