Kabam has grown from a handful of people creating games above a dim sum restaurant in Mountain View, California, to a global operation with more than 800 employees worldwide. Perhaps even more impressively, it has done so in the space of five years. Its recently opened Berlin office is headed up by Kenneth Go, and handles live operations, player experience, localisation, quality assurance and marketing. We ask him to describe how Kabam does business in his own words.
What is Kabam about?
Kabam is the leader in free-to-play games in the western world. We believe in making triple-A quality games for mobile platforms, and creating long-lasting franchises with a deep relationship with our customers.
What does triple-A mean in terms of mobile free-to-play games?
Free-to-play sometimes has a connotation of being lower quality in the traditional game industry, and we really want to change that. Some of our games in the past have been somewhat low fidelity in some people’s minds, and I think that’s been the case for a lot of companies. Especially in emerging platforms, with new business models, it’s mostly about speed. We’ve shifted our focus recently to focus more on triple-A-quality games. We have a really amazing 3D fighting game with the Marvel licence called Contest Of Champions coming. And we have two really amazing action-RPGs coming out, one built by our San Francisco studio from guys who worked on the Diablo franchise. We have another game called Moonrise, which is coming from Undead Labs, founded by some of the people who did Guild Wars. So we’re really trying to invest a lot in the quality of games.
How has Kabam evolved to become a publisher of other studios’ games?
Publishing is relatively new to us; we’ve only been doing it for a couple of years, but we’ve invested a large amount of resources into it. We have two different business units, completely separated, and they have different budgets and different resources, so there’s no conflict of interests between the sides. So we can push as much as we want, and it’s forecasted to be a large portion of the business going forward. But here at the Berlin studio, we’re mainly focused on supporting the firstparty games.
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