Games guru Tommy Palm on the rise of King

okay it's Pocket Gamer and we're in a very sunny la for the for the E3 game show and we're uh at the Swedish Affairs event and we're in the Rockstar Swedish house and we're with a rockstar Swedish mobile Guru game developer who are you who are you rockar Guru I'm um Tommy Palm I work for King as the mobile Guru and there that your business card so no it's actually changed to games Guru now sorry wi just the games Guru yeah yeah okay so last time we met we were GDC and King king.com had just become king so how's it how's it been going since then now you're not off Doom anymore no yeah it's a part of our transition from from being really focused on web to going over to multiplatform and making our games available on on all the different devices and uh as you uh might have seen with can Crush T that's been a very um working concept um so now we have uh

both Bubble Witch Saga and cany Crush Saga as these really crossplatform games where you can pick up anywhere and you can continue game session whether you're on smartphone or tablet or on your PC that's kind of be that's kind of been the thing that that King has kind of I think I mean obviously you didn't invent it there something that you kind of when you came to the mobile market that's you came in this is how it's going to work and I think since then that's basically become the industry standard but if you don't do that it was like yeah I definitely think that bubble with Saga was was the first game that was fully synchronized and the same with with Candy Crush uh when that came out there was no no games that really work like this where you can buy something on one platform and and you will have access to that on on the other platforms too and we really see how our players now as you said feel that that's something that they will expect games to be in the future and uh when we look when we look at the big top grossing games certainly we kind of write about supercell we we

write about kind of Puzzle and Dragons but somehow we kind of I don't know why we don't talk about King in the same way why why do you think that is I mean because you're CU Kenny fresh Sager is probably the second top grossing game in the world and in certain territories will be the top grossing game yeah I think uh might have to do with with the game being very casual and and and focused on on all type of people where you as a game press mostly write about the more hardcore games with had a fan following that's slightly different but we can Crush we have something that's kind of a social phenomena people tend to talk about it outside the normal uh channels and what we've seen I guess I guess uh from lots of companies in the space is you talk about hardcore people are kind of moving more hardcore so we've seen it with Zinger a lot they're kind of doing maybe midcore hardcore games but you guys don't really that doesn't really seem likely to be happening unless you're going to kind of give us some secret no I think we found a very good segment with with uh making the game both real accessible so they're easy to

get a hold of on any platform plus that they are very social which means that they have to be uh simple to understand and and uh you know the the first part of the game is is relas to get into once it progresses they become more challenging and and we introduce new elements and these are typically games that we continue to work with lot and and add new levels and and uh features uh every second week and does seem interesting as well me talk about Zinger who I guess are some kind of I mean I guess some competive but some comparator to you to King who Zing were big on Facebook and then went crazy to mobile or tried to do that whereas you seem to have a much more crossplatform approach in terms of how you think about your games kind of exist as games and then you think about how you put them out there yeah we've been very uh careful about making the games feel that they were made for mobile we've completely Rewritten the game uh from scratch in C++ and and uh

been been focusing on making sure that if the game is on Android it should feel like an Android game the the the players are expecting to have a certain uh game experience there and uh I think that's been a very important success factor good lovely thanks thanks for your time good to talk to you thank you