Interview with Daniel Bernstein, Founder of Sandlot Games

I founded Sandlot Games in 2002 as a publisher and developer in the casual games segment. At the time there weren’t very many casual games companies, the leader of course was PopCap. We decided to take a different type of approach with our games. We took a couple of very big risks early on that have definitely paid off with the company with the games like Super Granny and Tradewinds.

Both of these titles were very much different from the match type games that were very common during that time. They were risky games to make, but we decided to do that because we really felt that the casual games market is truly a mainstream market where you have folks that are not just interested in a portal match mechanic but are interested in other types of games such as a strategy game of the type of Tradewinds and the arcade platform or the type of Super Granny.

Well, our competitors at the time were pretty much mostly doing the matching type games. So, we really took a bet there that there was really more to this market. Frankly, they were a hit but not incredibly successful. Fortunately they grew more and more successful with every successive iteration. As the casual market matured, we had a foothold on a lot of the users that were interested in a different game play experience.

It was not necessarily the clearest business thinking. The clearest business thinking at the time obviously would have been to really make as many match games as we could. But, that was really more of a long term strategy for us to really build the games that we love to play. As kids growing up, a lot of the games that we built hearken to the days of 80′s and early 90′s arcade and the PC game playing experience.

So for us, it was very important to really enjoy ourselves the game that we built. Obviously, having an eye in the market it is a business sector, but at the same time, has games that are also interesting to us.

Not all of our partners took the very early version of the games that we created. Now they are taking all of the games. Specifically for the reason that they know that we tend to be innovators in this genre. The casual games market is very performance driven.

It really goes back and goes down to the game again. The game itself has to be very a compelling experience and a unique experience. In the case of Cake Mania for example, we’ve done some focus testing so that people would finish the first bakery and they will essentially see a different logo, and they would see that right before the trial period cuts them off. They want more, and as a result, they purchase the game. So, we do a bit of focus testing and timing to make sure that the game play experience that we’re giving is rich but it does not satiate our consumers.

It’s well past the desktop at this point. You can play our games everywhere, from the desktop to the mobile phone and very soon, on consoles.

Really, what you’re doing with casual games is you’re doing with the massive marketing opportunity on the PC to get your game in front of millions and millions of users. In our case, 100 million users approximately play a Sandlot game. As a result, you really can’t buy that type of marketing. So, that marketing then can be used to really promote the mobile and the console versions of our products.

We do put resources on each medium, sometimes the same resource. But we take a very holistic approach. The mobile device has a certain set of constraints that a PSP does not, that a DS does not. We try to really maximize the game play on each particular device. Not every game is going to work on every device. We’re also very cognizant of that.

We take a game play centric approach because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re going to be judged by consumers.

I’ve always played games and I’ve written games in my spare time. I think what’s really different between game companies and other software companies, is that they are focused on entertainment.

Game creation is an art. That’s what’s really fascinating, interesting, unpredictable and what has me coming to work everyday and making the best of what we do. When you hit something and it works, it could be potentially several orders of magnitude from something that does not hit so well. In this model where you try a game before you buy, consumers really vote with their credit cards, whether or not the game is good or not.

I think that’s what’s really most exciting, is that really you can create a game and spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on it and at the end of the day, consumers are going to be lukewarm. And then, you can create a game maybe for a fraction of that with just a few resources, and consumers are going to eat it up.

What’s really fun about it is that there is no business need to address or consumer need to address. Consumers really don’t need the stuff, other than they need it to really replace their TV as far as the predominant form of entertainment. They don’t need games, but they want them. Our job as game creators is to really make them want it more.

That’s tough. It starts out with a gut feeling. We go through a design, then the prototyping phase, and by the time the game is a playable and is a beta, we actually have a large group of focus testers that we send it out to. We have a set of metrics that we use to test whether a game we believe in our best estimation is going to be successful or not. That’s really the biggest barometer that we have of a game’s success is how it’s going to do in a focus test.

Probably at this point we queue a good 25 to 30 percent of the games that we create. As far as concepts are concerned there are literally hundreds of concepts in the confines of Sandlot Games, probably even at this point maybe even thousands. It really comes down to building a prototype and seeing a project through to the end and having enough support of everybody here to feel that it’s going to be a great game that sells really well.

I can only tell from my personal experience. It’s kind of like the perfect storm that happened in Seattle, especially in the casual gaming space. Because of the fact that there was a number of very important distributors such as Microsoft and Real Network, that allowed the birth of these very important and large developers such as PopCap and Sandlot Games and Big Fish Games.

That there’s a flip side which is being too conservative and growing your business too slowly. There’s a nice, happy medium for a fast track, high tech company that makes it possible for it to make the bets that it needs to make to be able to succeed and to grow fast but not to compromise it. I think it’s very difficult for CEOs to really find that balance and to react very, very quickly to market conditions.

There are a lot of opportunities in all these areas. For us taking the bigger bets in games like TradeWinds online, which is a massively multiplayer version of the TradeWinds game that we have under development, I think is necessary because we’re finding a more competitive market from a content perspective. Also we’re seeing that the consumer is becoming much more educated and much more aware of games out there. And much more interested in a rich, comprehensive experience that may include things like multiplayer, micro transactions, in game purchasing.