It looks like KIXEYE, the gaming company known for its online combat strategy games such as Backyard Monsters, is making a few strategic moves of its own. Today, KIXEYE dropped two major announcements, each from separate sides of the globe.
It looks like KIXEYE, the gaming company known for its online combat strategy games such as Backyard Monsters, is making a few strategic moves of its own. Today, KIXEYE dropped two major announcements, each from separate sides of the globe.
The first: KIXEYE is expanding overseas to Brisbane-based Australia studio. The new studio will be built with the team of a fellow strategy-minded developer, 3 Blokes studios.
“The talent pool in Australia is exploding, and the 3 Blokes team is evidence of that,” said Will Harbin, CEO at KIXEYE. “George and his team are highly driven and passionate game developers who aren’t afraid to push the limits of creativity and innovation. Those are the types of individuals we’re looking to join our mission at KIXEYE.”
The new Australian team carries quite a bit of experience itself. George Fidler, GM of KIXEYE Australia, has served as GM of EA’s Asia Pacific Studio, and also created SEGA’s the lead development studio Creative Assembly. The team carries a great amount of knowledge of the strategy genre as well, with many members of the team having previously worked on the popular Total War series.
In addition to its partnership in Australia, KIXEYE is also working with Japan’s ngmoco (a property of DeNA) in order to bring their popular Backyard Monsters series to mobile devices. Famous for their enormous Mobage social networking platform, ngmoco and DeNA have been spreading like wildfire over the course of the past few years.
The Backyard Monsters series is all about battling and fending off monster invasions in a resource-collecting strategy environment. Over the Mobage network, the game will move from its Facebook home territory onto iOS and Android devices.
“Our focus is developing super high quality games for the browser, but this is an opportunity for us to experiment on the mobile platform and broaden the reach of one of our most successful games,” said Brandon Barber, SVP of Marketing at KIXEYE. “We’re confident mobile users will enjoy spilling blood in Backyard Monsters just as much as they do on Facebook.”
Whether it be physically adding in Australia, creating long-distance partnerships in Japan, or testing the waters to a brand new format in mobile gaming, KIXEYE is shaping up to be a huge player in the future of strategy gaming.
