Big viking games
He needed a source of revenue to buy more time. Exactly how long, Lai didn’t know, and he worried that if he kept pouring the majority of BVG’s resources into HTML5, he might drive the company into the ground before his strategy paid off.
The distribution explosion Lai had hoped for never happened and revenue was only a fraction of what they expected.ĭespite the poor results from Tiny Kingdoms, Lai still believed that the winning move in the mobile games industry would be HTML5, but that it was going to take longer for BVG to find a way to harness the potential of HTML5. But BVG couldn’t quite make the HTML5 technology work the way they wanted, and the experience for the players wasn’t on par with games developed on the standard game app technologies. Two years later, in 2013, BVG developed Tiny Kingdoms, a role-playing game that Lai believed would be their first HTML5 blockbuster and would easily generate $50,000 a day. Using their own capital, Lai and Thomson began hiring a team of developers and pouring millions of dollars into their HTML5 strategy. It was the kind of advantage that a small studio like BVG needed to compete with companies that routinely spent millions–sometimes tens of millions–to market a single game. Instead of having to rely solely on competing in the crowded app stores where most games are distributed, HTML5 would allow BVG to easily distribute its games in other ways, such as through instant messenger platforms, where a game could potentially spread like wildfire. At the time, HTML5 was a relatively new programming language and no one was really using it for mobile game development, but Lai believed they could harness it to gain several advantages, especially when it came to distribution. Their plan was to become a leader in the highly competitive mobile games industry by developing games using HTML5-games that could be played using a mobile browser as well as a game app. Three years earlier, in 2011, Lai teamed up with veteran game developer Greg Thomson to found Big Viking Games (BVG).
He had just drafted an email and was debating whether to press send–it was a message that had the potential to rescue his company from a serious crisis … or to sink it. On the table in front of him lay his iPhone.
#Big viking games serial#
In the winter of 2014, serial entrepreneur Albert Lai sat alone waiting for a friend at a restaurant down the street from his latest venture, Big Viking Games.