I’m here with Dan Bernstein, the Founder and CEO of Sandlot Games. Dan, would you mind giving us an introduction to Sandlot?
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.
How would you qualify that this was a risky strategy in comparison to what your competitors were doing at the time?
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.
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