Where’s My Water? How the biggest Disney franchise you’ve never heard of will overtake Angry Birds
“Over the next couple of years somebody’s going to build a game that reaches a billion people,” Bart Decrem, publisher of hit iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge, told a gathering of journalists and toy makers at a briefing in London this week.
That’s a sixth of the world’s population, but as daunting as that is, it’s a feat that’s beginning to look feasible. Angry Birds isn’t far off: Rovio has clocked more than 500 million downloads of its spectacular gaming success.
But Decrem doesn’t work for Rovio. Decrem is Disney’s new head of mobile, and he wants to get there first. But using Disney’s instantly recognisable characters to do so? Too easy.
Disney – no stranger to technology – has a whole array of characters it could launch on to the iPhone App Store. And while it does dabble in this (AppMATes, an iPad app that interacts with toys from the movie Cars 2, was released last year), Decrem doesn’t seem remotely interested in pursuing this.
“For existing IPs [intellectual properties] we still do some of this,” he explains. “They do well but they disappear…the other thing we’re trying to do is build new Disney characters.”
And these new characters have to capture our imaginations like never before. “Smartphones, people love them. They’re fun and beautiful and perfect, and apps that stand out are fun and beautiful and perfect. But how do you stand out on the app store when there are 500,000 apps?”
Decrem’s answer is Where’s My Water? It’s a charming, physics based gamed in the same vein as Cut The Rope. You’ve got to guide the water through a level to reach Swampy, a rather nervous alligator. (You can download it on iPhone and Android).
It’s the big-eyed, bashful star, Decrem says, that has led to Where’s My Water’s success. He won’t talk download numbers, but it’s been the number one paid on the iPhone App Store in 79 countries, and sat at the top in the US for 45 days. To that end, Decrem’s team worked with Disney’s animators to come up with these adorable characters and setting. “The challenge for us is to create new characters, and on new devices.”
Despite having revenues of more than $40bn and around 156,000 employees worldwide, Decrem claims that Disney is not hindered by excessive red tape. He admitted that the business can get “bureaucratic” due to the “layers of decision-making”, but he feels that the company is also “decentralised”, allowing his team to innovate.
“Disney.com has a partnership witty YouTube, and they wanted to do an animated show. We had full control over the Swampy character, and so worked with the team in Europe to make it happen,” he said. “Disney is a very decentralised company. It can get bureaucratic as there is all these layers to decision-making, but in this case we have really been able to leverage the power of the company.”
Most interestingly, Decrem has been able to encourage Disney that churning out weak games just to capitalise on a Disney iP is not the way to succeed. When Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides came out last year, the fourth movie in the franchise, his team started making a companion game, but opted to delay the development even past the DVD window to get it right. Pirates of the Caribbean: Master of the Seas, a role-playing game similar to Zynga’s Mafia Wars, has since rated well on the App Store and crucially made the most of the iPhone platform.
“We need to be creating these great new characters and ideas, and then make them come alive on mobile,” said Decrem. “There are lots of people doing things around smartphones at Disney and we are trying to do 10 to 12 games each year. So you just start with the basic premise – ‘Do we have a gaming idea that people will want to play?’ If the answer is no, then don’t do it. We are trying to make great games, rather than think that there is a movie coming out and we should make a game for it. That is not how you build great games.”
