Developer’s Blog: Stick Cricket
We’re back with a new Developer’s Blog post, featuring Colin Rowe, our Creative Director, and Paul Collins, our CEO! Our new 3D, multiplayer, Stick Cricket game is just around the corner, and what better way to celebrate than to take a trip down memory lane, back to when Paul and Colin joined forces to bring Stick Cricket to the masses. If you’re a Stick Cricket lover, keep on reading!
Origins
Stick Cricket started as a personal project for Colin. When asked about it, he remembers it vividly: “I was working in a Government job doing web development. I wanted to learn how to make interactive content for the web using Adobe’s hottest new software — Flash. My employer didn’t approve my request to attend a training course, so I decided that I would teach myself! I figured that making a game with Flash would keep this interesting for me. Cricket is my favourite sport, and I had played a few free cricket games but thought that they were a bit slow, and didn’t really have a fun factor. I set myself the challenge of firstly improving my skills for the workplace, and secondly, making a better cricket game than any I had played. I was spending nearly 2 hours a day on a train commuting to the office, so I started using this time tapping away at my laptop. ”
In 2003, Colin had already developed an early version of his cricket game. By December, he uploaded it to a blank webpage, so that his friends and colleagues (including Matt Clements, our founding developer) could play it. Everyone loved the game! One of Colin’s friends thought it had potential, so he posted the link on the “Aussie Rules” forum Big Footy to help him get some play-testers. It was so successful and generated so much traffic that the web service broke!
Stick Cricket
A year later, Colin added the title “Stick Cricket” because, surprise surprise, the players were literally stick men. At the time, Paul was running a creative agency that specialised in designing and sourcing game content for brands. When Colin licensed his game to a UK games website, Paul’s business partner saw it and recognised the opportunity to develop it into a commercial product. Their initial approach was to restructure Stick Cricket into an interactive games centre for Cricinfo.com (now owned by ESPN), which was the most prominent online cricket news and scores portal in the world at the time. As it turned out Paul and Colin launched the game on it’s own website with Cricinfo as primary sponsor. Little did they know that it would grow and turn into a household name loved by thousands of cricket enthusiasts around the world.
Paul and Colin faced two significant challenges at the time. The first one was to turn a simple game mechanic into a big game scenario that would not only entertain players on their first play but would also bring them back for more for weeks on end.
The second one was securing the domain name Stickcricket.com. During testing, someone else had speculatively purchased the domain. It took many days of negotiation and representations to recover the domain in time for the global launch in September 2004. We only managed to get control of the name 36 hours before launch!
An unexpected success
When Stick Cricket first launched on mobile in Dec 2010, they had absolutely no idea how successful the game would be. Paul explains: “We did a calculation based on the number of people coming to the website. We had a million unique visitors per month, and we made the assumption that perhaps 5% of them had smartphones — that, we thought, would assure us of at least 50,000 downloads. And maybe then 10% of those might spend a few dollars over the course of the month. We forecast that it might take 15 months to recover our investment in the game. However, what we hadn’t factored, was the huge audience of people who knew the brand from our origins and weren’t currently visiting the website, yet were very keen on the game and crucially — were early adopters in the smartphone market. So as well as all our existing players who we could promote the game to, there were hundreds of thousands of Stick Cricketers who were coming across the title on the app store. We got to number 1 in Australia and, more remarkably, number 3 in the UK at Christmas, for a summer sports title targeting predominantly men is an incredible achievement. The game paid for itself in 3 days!”
The success of the game opened up opportunities to collaborate with the biggest names in the industry. For instance, we worked with AB De Villiers to promote his music, with Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, with Fox Sports channel in Australia, and we secured 5 years of sponsorship from KFC, which included TV commercials featuring Mark Waugh and on-pack promotions in every KFC outlet!
From then, we continued creating more games for our audience, and expanding Sticky’s universe not only with more Stick Cricket titles, like Stick Cricket 2, and Stick Cricket Super League but also with other sports, like Stick Tennis and Stick Soccer.
Bonus fact: As the character, Sticky, has changed over the years from a single line drawing, through facial features and ultimately to a fully fledged 3D character he has essentially evolved to look exactly like Nick Graham, our General Manager.
Chat with us!
Join us on Telegram to discuss the game with our team and other Stick Cricketers!
