Sometimes you just have to stand your ground

Many years ago, I joined a company called OMGPOP as a producer, the game studio equivalent of a product manager. At the time, OMGPOP was trying to expand into new mediums. The company had built an online gaming destination where people could log on and play casual multiplayer games. It was popular, but the audience was mostly adolescents and young teens — a demographic that doesn’t spend much money. It had traction, but not much revenue. The company’s runway was dwindling, and without much likelihood of raising more venture capital, it was time to try new things.

Some companies, like Zynga and Playfish, were making bank with Facebook games, so OMGPOP was trying that too. They tried two approaches: bringing over their existing live multiplayer games, like Draw My Thing, and building new simulation-style titles like the ones that made the most money on Facebook. These were the days of Farmville, and OMGPOP had shipped their own restaurant management game, a cute title called Cupcake Corner. Unfortunately, Cupcake Corner didn’t take off, and while Draw My Thing had a decent number of players, it didn’t move the needle either. OMGPOP was failing to break even on Facebook, but they were still trying, and they were also trying to put together a fledgling team to dive into another new market: mobile.

When I interviewed with OMGPOP, I had just wrapped up selling a viral Facebook app — my first “exit.” It wasn’t for much money, but the app had done well. At one point, I was even ranked in the top 10 Facebook developers by MAU, rubbing shoulders with some large companies (including Zynga). I had also launched a couple iPhone games, and that little bit of experience with mobile gaming piqued OMGPOP’s interest. I was brought in to help lead their games strategy, with my immediate mandate being to figure out how to get their first mobile game into the market. I tried my best with that project, a pet management game we called Puppy World, and it made some revenue, but it wasn’t a hit. We were back to the drawing board.

I remember one day the CEO brought me into a conference room along with some others to have an idea session. The ask was to figure out which of OMGPOP’s stable of titles from their Flash gaming catalog would be best suited to bring to mobile next. The stakes were pretty high. We needed a hit. So we needed to do this one right. Deciding which game to port was not actually that difficult. The game that had the most potential was Draw My Thing. It was consistently a standout title on the site, and it had more mass-market appeal, and likelihood of appealing to adults, than most of the games OMGPOP had. We knew it would need a new name though— the original founder’s proclivity for innuendo in game titles was probably going to be a hindrance to adoption. And we knew we would have to make some changes to port it to mobile. An iPhone or Android device is a much smaller screen compared to a desktop or laptop, and the entire interface would have to be modified to work within that constraint. Would the interface be landscape like on desktop, or portrait? And how would we build the multiplayer experience? And if people needed to be on the game simultaneously to play it, wouldn’t that limit the likelihood of adoption? And would they really want to play with strangers, or people they already know? We needed to do something different. So I shared some ideas.

I’m paraphrasing what I said then, because I don’t have a vivid memory, but it was something like this: “the game needs to be asynchronous. Synchronous multiplayer won’t work. No one should have to be online at the same time as anyone else to be able to play it. Instead, it should be turn-based. Players will send drawings back and forth. And to make it really accessible, instead of needing at least 4 people to start a game, like in Draw My Thing, it needs to work with just 2 people playing against each other.”

And so we set out to build the third iteration of Draw My Thing, but different this time.

We had no resources to do it — every engineer in the company was busy working on some other project. The board had asked OMGPOP to try to build as many games as possible, in the hopes that at least one would be successful enough to turn the company around, and everyone was doing just that. Eventually I was asked to lead the product team, which meant I was ultimately responsible for every game being built, which wasn’t fun. I also needed to interview more producers to come in and help run all the game projects we had. I remember interviewing one woman who was looking for a new role because she was totally burned out at her current job. She was producing 4 titles simultaneously, and she had had it. I was shocked. 4 titles! Who could survive like that? I felt so bad for her.

Months later, I was producing more than 4 titles simultaneously. Life is funny.

There were multiple Facebook games in development even while we were trying to do more on mobile. We even shipped a puzzle game on mobile while we were still developing Draw My Thing 3: secret project that still needs a name. And so we had an external team, a small outfit called Retired Astronaut Collective, which had at most 3 engineers building the project at any given time, and a part time producer that helped us manage this external team. They were really good at what they did. They used a long forgotten cross-platform framework called Marmalade that allowed them to build a performant game that they could ship to both iOS and Android simultaneously. And their lead engineer came up with a really clever way to handle the drawing loop. When you would draw on the screen, the game would record your movements as vector data. It would then upload that data, which was much smaller than if it had to upload a series of images or a video, and then it would just replay that drawing using that vector data on your opponent’s device. The drawing experience felt good too — it was like finger painting. It was easy to do. I remember thinking, if it feels like a basic human experience, something we all enjoyed doing in kindergarten, it will be universally enjoyable. I felt very optimistic that this could be successful. Usually I’m a cynic, but this project was different.

There was just one problem though. The game loop didn’t make sense. If you’re playing Pictionary 1v1, there is no incentive to let the other person guess your drawing. You gain points when you get a drawing right, but you don’t want your opponent to get it right. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. You’re better off tricking the other person, or lying, or something else that breaks the game. So I felt very strongly that the mechanic needed to change.

Instead of being competitive, it needed to be collaborative.

This idea didn’t go over well. People looked at me like I was crazy. “How can it be a game if there’s no score? It’s supposed to be competitive!” I offered an alternative: the score can be your streak with your partner — you try to make a good drawing on each turn, and they try to guess it right, and if you can both keep it up, your streak increases. The goal of the game is to avoid breaking the streak, and see how high the number goes. You’re working together. You’re a team. There’s no need for anyone to lose. You win together, or you start over.

This seemed obvious to me. The game made the most sense if we ditched the lobby approach, if players could play against people they know, if the experience was asynchronous, meaning two people could enjoy it without having to be online at the same time, and if there was no competition between them. But would you believe, I spent months defending that position. People would come to me and ask me about it. They would try to change my mind. They would go to the CEO and complain to him. It was a consistent source of tension. One morning the CEO came to me and said, he was outside playing catch with his son. And he realized catch is a collaborative game. There’s no score, it’s just how many times you can both catch the ball. And so you start to count how many times you can both do it in a row — a streak! And that’s when he realized we were building the same thing. So he came to understand it, and we were in agreement. And we had to stand our ground. I still remember telling people, “it doesn’t work any other way. We’ve thought about it. The gameplay is totally broken if people have to compete with each other. This is the only way to make it enjoyable. We have to stick with this approach.”

We had user tests, and people loved the drawing experience. But we couldn’t really test the gameplay loop. I remember trying to explain it to a friend of mine who was playing a lot of Words with Friends. I remember telling her, “it’s like Words with Friends, but you’re sending drawings back and forth.” Her response was: “what? That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t get it.”

We had a thread on the OMGPOP community forum where we asked the community to come up with a new name for what would be the mobile version of Draw My Thing. There were tons of suggestions. We had our own ideas in the company too. I remember I really liked Drawsome. It felt clever: draw + awesome. It sounded cool. But maybe too cool. We used it in the screen that would show up after guessing a drawing successfully. But the jury was still out on the name. One day a coworker was reading out a bunch of names from the community forum thread, and in a long list of names she said “Draw Something,” and it was one of those things where you didn’t even realize it at first, but it was so simple and unassuming that it just felt right. We all knew that was going to be it. The game was Draw Something.

When we finally launched Draw Something, about five months after we had agreed on the idea, and just a little more than one month before the company was going to run out of money, the board had already brought in a team of bankers to try to determine the value of the company’s assets to potentially sell off when the company eventually went bankrupt. Things were really tense — most of my coworkers had been polishing their résumés and interviewing wherever they could. And I had spent months telling my coworkers that I was positive Draw Something could turn things around. Maybe all the other game projects would fail (they did), but this one could work. And I still remember how they would look at me and say “I don’t see it.” It’s still hard to believe that I was the optimist in the room. But I really believed that it could work!

Looking back, it sounds too crazy to be true. The game launched around the same time that the CEO had to let some employees go because we wouldn’t have enough payroll to cover everyone for another month. We had allocated some money to buy advertising through TapJoy, a company that would advertise mobile games within other mobile games — the best way to bootstrap an audience at the time. We had just enough to get the game into the top 100 chart, and the rest would come down to how much it could grow organically. That initial weekend would decide our fate.

By Sunday it was growing like wildfire.

The game wasn’t the kind of game that was expected to generate a lot of sales. It wasn’t going to be like Clash of Clans. Players could pay to remove ads and they could buy color packs. But ads could generate good revenue if a game had a lot of players. And pretty soon, we did. Tens of millions of people played Draw Something in the first month. And it was the kind of game they would invite their friends and family members to play along with them. Since it was asynchronous, if you wanted to keep playing, you needed to start multiple games with as many people as you could. So in that initial onboarding, you would have a nice drawing session, and then you would do more. Each new player would onboard multiple people. And then people would share their drawings online. It became the most talked about game on Twitter. I remember we would put Twitter up on a projector and just read all of the tweets about it together. People would share their favorite drawings, and tweet asking if anyone wanted to play with them, and then it became surreal to see celebrities doing it too. Shortly after the game launched, GDC (the Game Developers Conference) rolled around, and I went partly to treat myself. Everyone at GDC was talking about this game. But I had to go back home early because we were too busy keeping the momentum going. We had so much traffic that we ended up getting rate limited by Amazon S3 (Amazon’s hosting service for files)— something we didn’t even know was possible. Amazon had never publicized a rate limit for S3 — it was supposed to be unlimited! The backend team ended up having to migrate the entire backend architecture to a collocated environment with a different provider — a herculean feat to perform while the game was still live. We managed to keep things running, and we were making more than enough to keep the lights on.

Of course, potential acquirers came knocking. The CEO received calls from EA and Disney pretty quickly. He hired back the people he had to lay off just a month prior so they could be part of the acquisition. Zynga was aggressively interested, and Mark Pincus flew out from the west coast to NYC to meet with the CEO personally. I still chuckle to this day, because the bankers who were brought in to try to structure a fire sale for OMGPOP suddenly had a massive valuation on their hands. In the end they made out handsomely from the deal. Probably the best deal they ever had!

I did not end up joining Zynga. I dodged that bullet, but I remember feeling like my life was totally upside down when I found myself applying for jobs and talking to recruiters after having just shipped the most successful mobile game of all time (literally). I still remember walking down the street in Manhattan one day, looking for a building where I would be meeting a recruiter, and as I waited outside the entrance to be let in, I overheard a group of girls as they were walking down the street past me. One of them was explaining to the other two about “this drawing game on the phone.” It was Draw Something. I’ll never forget what that felt like.

And my friend who didn’t understand the game when I tried explaining it to her? She ended up falling in love with it when we finally launched it. She told me that she would play the game with her mom, and it was the first mobile game that her mom actually played. They would spend hours on it, sending drawings back and forth. They both loved it.

This wasn’t meant to be a walk down memory lane. In all these years, I’ve never actually written down much about what happened. It was a crazy experience, one that seems hard to believe even when I recount it. But I wanted to write this to say that sometimes you just have to stand your ground. You know why you’ve designed something the way you’ve designed it. You’ve done the research, you’ve done the explorations, you’ve looked at all of the available options, and you need to stick with the plan. Other people might not get it, but you do, and that’s what matters, as long as you’re willing to accept the outcome. Draw Something being a non-competitive game made sense to everyone when it became a big hit. I just had to stick it out until it was.

I thought I would share some fun links, while you’re here:

1. This was the promotional video, uploaded a month before the game was released. It was never shared anywhere, so this upload has hardly any views: https://vimeo.com/user9998025/draw
2. The blog post is still one of the best compendiums of amazing drawings around: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/draw-something-masterpieces
3. An agency called “Muse Amsterdam” once invited potential interns to apply by starting a game with their Draw Something account and sending them a drawing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMH2N6rSUQQ
4. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency had a piece about Draw Something, and of course it was amazing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/famous-artists-letters-about-draw-something
5. And here I was hyping up our new game right when we launched it:

And a couple of weeks later:

And a couple of weeks later:

(That was a great username.)