Building ‘Best Fiends’ by Investing into Creativity
When we first launched Best Fiends four years ago, we set out with a vision to develop a brand that could live for decades. To do that, we’ve tried to build a company that can be a brilliant home for some of the world’s best creative talent.
By using a game as an introduction to the world, characters and story of Best Fiends, we wanted to build out a digital ecosystem, with the intention of further engaging our audience in different ways beyond the game.
We aim to set the bar high on visual and editorial quality, investing into experiences that we hope our audience will appreciate. It’s the attention to small details that will enable us to build out a long lasting brand. Our business model is predicated on being directly connected to our audience, and we operate our brand as a live service, continually improving and iterating our offering. There’s something new every day!
We have now introduced over 500 wonderful characters, created over 2,500 levels of compelling gameplay, told stories through feature-film quality animations, and built out social media channels packed full of content that have a combined total of 2.9M followers.
To date, over 85 million people have downloaded Best Fiends games. And, as we’ve improved key engagement metrics and the breadth of the experience, our revenue has grown too, primarily driven by our original game and the incredible team building that out. Revenues have grown 70 percent since the start of the year, with September 2018 hitting a new monthly high of $6.8M. We reached profitability in 2017 and Best Fiends has now generated over $150M in lifetime revenues.
Looking back at 2018, we’re super proud of the way we’ve used our creative work to extend out the Best Fiends brand.
We launched our third animated short Fort of Hard Knocks in July, and we released our fourth animation, Baby Slug’s Big Day Out (link above), in September. We tie the animation stories into in-game content, to try and connect the dots for a thoughtful experience. Our strategy has been to develop animations that could run before a film in the movie theater. And if you read some of the comments from fans, it seems there is demand for more animations, so we’ll aim to deliver there!
For our community, we now produce a monthly video tied to each update that shares the latest in the Best Fiends world, hosted by the wonderful Kimberley Crossman.
And it works both ways. Sometimes members of our community let us know incredible stories of their own. One couple got married because of Best Fiends, and for another couple in the UK, the game meant something else to them. Do check out this video, it’s pretty special!
We also just launched our Best Fiends store, offering collectable, limited edition products, aiming for the kind of quality and thoughtfulness that you might expect in a shop at a Disney park. Given our dual Finnish-American heritage (we have offices in Helsinki, Finland, and Los Angeles, California) we’re trying to marry a Nordic design sensibility with an American-style entertainment brand. The intent of the store is to strengthen the brand, and as it evolves, we’ll release new products alongside new characters, animations, and in-game updates.
Additionally, as we work to reach new levels of growth, we are pleased to announce that we added Sylvain Cunzi, previously at Next Games and Rovio, as VP of Game Technology, Brian Ru, formerly at Raine, as Director of Strategy & Operations, and Jamie Samson, formerly at Fox, as Legal Counsel. Welcome!
We’re lucky to have an opportunity to build out our world. It’s good to see the foundations going deeper as we connect our game, our animations and our consumer products through a mobile experience that we curate. Our business growth is evidence that we are on the right path, and we are excited about the next chapter in our story.
Thanks for reading!
