When I first met Paul Thelen (founder of Big Fish Games) four years

ago, it was on his office boat on Lake Union in Seattle with his

full-time staff of three. Since then, Big Fish Games has expanded

to 100+ employees, released one of the most popular casual game

series (Mystery Case Files) and grown its Web site into one of

the largest distributors of casual games on the Internet (they

must have gotten a bigger boat). We sat down to talk to

Paul Thelen to learn the secret of their success and the

future of casual games.

How did you come up with the name Big Fish Games ("BFG")?

It was originally just kind of a joke. I was a company of

one person working out of my house, hardly a Big Fish

of the industry. A friend of mine furthered the

irony by superimposing a "Big Fish" over an

image of the earth. My company of one was hardly

the Big Fish in the pond called earth.

Yet, BFG has grown into a "big fish" in the casual game

space, competing (and partnering) with such large companies

as Real Networks, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. How did BFG

start and what do you think accounts for your success?

I wrote the business plan for RealArcade which was the

first high volume distribution service for game downloads.

I worked closely with Popcap and Gamehouse in their

transition from great web games to high quality

downloadable versions. In the following three years

we launched over a hundred games from dozens of

developers and I got a great sense of what it took

to build a successful game. I left RealNetworks after

3 years to try my hand at building games. I took a

8 day trip to Hawaii and read a programming manual cover to

cover and wrote my first prototype on the plane trip

home. In the following 15 months I wrote

12 games...well ok, 7 unique games and 5 varieties of Mahjong.

Your marketing slogan is "A New Game Every Day."

Can you share with us the decision-making process of

how you pick games to offer on your Web site?

When we were purely a game developer it was a very

frustrating process to get games distributed on large

portals. This was especially the case when I was sure

I had a hit on my hands but the portals did not believe

in the game. The problems was that our core demographic

are 45 year old gamers, largely women, and the folks

deciding what games to launch were mostly men in their twenties.

We launched Big Fish Games with a different philosophy, of

letting the customers decide what games are good instead

of our employees. Launching 30 games a month gives each

game a chance for broad consumer exposure, an opportunity

that many surprise hit titles would not otherwise have.

Even at 30 games a month, only 20% to 30% of games

submitted to us get released, based largely on a quality

threshold not our judgment of whether it will be a

hit or not. If a game resonates with our audience in the

first few days (most games will get 30,000 to 40,000

download off the text "New Releases" section, a very statistically

valid sample), it will bubble up the rankings and sell

very well. If the game does not do well, it

drifts down in the rankings and is eventually removed

from the site.

Some developers think their games will get 'lost' with so

many games, but if the game is good, it will get to the

top of the genre and maybe even the top of the entire

site and generate significant sales. We think it is better

to have a shot of success than not getting launched at

all. We distribute over 300,000 games on peak days now,

so the games that self select and do well will generate

impressive sales numbers. The few things we do have

control over like newsletters and the feature spots

on our home page, are based on game performance,

not relationship with this developer or that.

In addition to distribution, BFG develops and publishes its own games.

What games that you have developed and/or published that you're especially fond of?

We are of course delighted with the success of Mystery Case Files, but our latest game

Mystic Inn is my wife's favorite game and has an incredible amount of polish and some

very unique twists on the "Betty's Beer Bar" genre.

My favorite game of the year, we published out of passion and not out of listening to our customers.

It is called Master of Defense, a real-time strategy game. Way out of the norm for our

demographic, but I got totally consumed by this game for several weeks so I figured we would

take a risk and publish it into our casual audience. It did surprisingly well and a

certain segment of our base was fanatical about it, but it was definitely not geared towards

the casual game masses. We are very selective about the games we publish, and, at the end of

the day all we are really doing is some Q&A and leveraging our existing relationships. So, we pass most

of the third party distributor upside revenue back to the game developer.

What about other casual games? Anything new and interesting that has caught your attention recently?

We have been experimenting with large file casual games. We launched the game, Law and Order, from

Legacy Interactive. It was a great game for our demographic but the demo version was 100MB and the

full version over 1.4GB. We were pleasantly surprised with the sales it generated. A great demo

and famous brand made this game a surprise success in spite of the 30 to 60 minutes to download it,

even on a broadband connection.

The Mystery Case Files games (Huntsville and Prime Suspects) are among the most popular casual

games on the Internet. Can you share with us the creative process designing this series?

To be fair, Huntsville took us by surprise. We did a lot of usability testing and focus groups to tune

it over a 9 month period, but when we put it live on our site and it generated over 1000 sales units

in the first 24 hours, I literally almost fell out of my chair. It took a while to really understand what

made Huntsville successful and we tried to make sure that element was not lost in Prime Suspects.

We then tried to add new twists to make it more challenging and added 50% more content than the original

had. The result was more than twice the game play, a lot more variety, and a final puzzle that will have

the brightest minds scratching their heads. We also added some fascinating logic so that each time

you play the game, the clues lead up to different 'prime suspects' and a different master criminal...oops,

am I giving too much away?

Who do you think is the ideal player on Big Fish Games? Do you think that will change in the future?

We definitely focus on the "mature gamer", the over 35 crowd. If you try to please all audiences, you will

serve them all "ok" and be the best with none of them. We want to be the best with the "mature gamer".

This is everything from the voice we use in communications, the art style and colors on our website, the

games we launch daily, and the games we develop internally.

What is your opinion about multiplayer casual games? Do you believe multiplayer casual

games will be as popular in the US as they are in Asia?

It depends on your definition of casual games, as it has become a pretty broad term for anything that

is not a core game. The massively multiplayer online games ("MMO's") that are taking off in Asia

appeal to the younger audiences. I do not think there has been a real run-away success with MMO's for

the 45 year old women yet anywhere. The Asian MMO's range from hard-core war to fantasy RPG, to more

playful titles in Europe like Habbo Hotel that appeal to the instant messenger crowd (the 15 to

25 non-core gamers). The mature puzzle and bingo players haven't really caught on to the commitment

that an MMO model requires. One of the many definitions of casual games is that they are easy to get

into with no challenging learning curve to overcome. Some current casual gamers will graduate to games with

steep learning curves and broad flexibility like the game play of Second Life from my old RealNetworks buddy

Philip Rosedale over at Linden Labs, but the "keep it simple" crowd have yet to bite on this type of game.

Suppose we fast-forward 5 years from now (the year 2011). What types of games and offerings

that I will be playing on BFG look like?

I think the game mechanics will continue to be the same, but the story and production values

will increase. One of my favorite "core" games is American McGee's Alice. Alice, if you really

boil it down and remove some of the shooting, is essentially a series of fun puzzle games to solve

with a variety of very innovative mechanics, but with stunning graphics and top notch production

values. If you could convince a casual gamer to spend 20 minutes or so to learn that game, remove

the stigma of it being a core game, and make it a reasonable sized download, it could be what the

future of casual games looks like.

Can you give us any hints of your upcoming games or features on your Web site?

I am sure it is no surprise but we have big plans for "Mystery Case Files: To be Named".

We also have a completely new game the likes have never been seen before... look for it around the first

week in July... it involves foreign countries and photographs ;-)

Finally, any closing words for your fans out there?

If you liked Huntsville and Prime Suspects, hold on to your hat for the episode in this series!