Digital Chocolate

» see digitalchocolate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Trip Hawkins started Electronic Arts in 1982 and The 3DO Company in 1993, and when 3DO went bankrupt in 2003 he started Digital Chocolate in October of the same year. The bet was that the next mass gaming platform was the phone in everyone's pocket, which in 2003 meant a Java handset with a numeric keypad and a screen smaller than a credit card. He was right about the platform and wrong by about five years on the hardware.

The company grew by buying studios. Finnish developer Sumea came in 2004 and became the Helsinki office, which is where Tower Bloxx was made in 2005, a stacking game about building a city one swaying tower block at a time that ended up on an enormous number of handsets. Rollercoaster Rush followed in 2006 and Crazy Penguin Catapult in 2007, and the trade press named Digital Chocolate the best mobile games developer in both of those years. At its widest the company ran studios from San Mateo out to Bangalore.

Then the iPhone arrived and the distribution model went with it. Everything Digital Chocolate had built assumed that a game reached players because a carrier agreed to put it on its portal, and the App Store deleted that arrangement in about two years. The company pivoted to Facebook games, Hawkins stepped back from chief executive in May 2012 alongside a layoff of 180 people, the Helsinki studio closed in 2013 and Barcelona was sold to Ubisoft with the Galaxy Life game. In April 2014 the four Facebook titles that were left, with three to four million players between them, were licensed to RockYou, which also hired the developers who worked on them.

In Turkey the carrier deck was how mobile games worked for most of the decade. You did not choose a game, you scrolled a menu on your operator's portal and were charged for the download, and the catalog was whatever had been negotiated into that menu. That is the exact channel Digital Chocolate sold through, and it is why a company with this many hits left almost no brand memory: the operator was the storefront and the developer's name was the small print.

~ the case file ~

~ the carrier deck ~

Selling a Java game in 2005 meant porting it. Not once, but to hundreds of handset models with their own screen sizes and their own memory ceilings, then getting each build approved by each operator in each country. Digital Chocolate was good at this to an unglamorous degree, and the skill was worth a company, because the barrier kept smaller studios out.

It was also the most perishable asset in the industry. The moment a player could reach a store directly from the device, every hour spent building carrier relationships and porting pipelines became an overhead with nothing on the other end. Studios that had been weakest at the deck game, because they had no relationships to protect, were the ones best placed in 2008.

~ tower bloxx ~

The one everybody has seen without knowing whose it was. A crane swings a tower block over a stack and you tap to drop it, the stack wobbles according to how badly you timed the release, and a city fills in behind you as the towers go up. It came out of the Helsinki studio in 2005, got ported onto an absurd number of handsets, and later reappeared as a download on the smartphone platforms that had already killed the business that made it.

~ the pivot that did not take ~

The move to Facebook games put the company into the hardest market of the era, against Zynga at full strength, with a design culture built for two-minute play sessions on a keypad. Millionaire City and Army Attack did real numbers and Galaxy Life was the biggest of them, but social games needed constant content and heavy user acquisition spending, and a company already shrinking could not fund either at the required rate.

The 2012 layoffs and Hawkins's move to an advisory role were the signal. After that the story is disposal: Barcelona and its best-performing title to Ubisoft in 2013, Helsinki shut, and the remainder licensed out the following spring.

~ where the games went ~

RockYou's strategy at the time was buying up games other publishers no longer wanted and running them for the players who stayed, which its chief executive Lisa Marino compared to a cable channel making money on reruns. The Digital Chocolate titles were exactly that: functioning games with small, loyal populations and no future development budget. Crazy Penguin Wars ran on until around 2015 and then went too, and the Facebook game platform they depended on was itself winding down.

Hawkins had now presided over two endings in a row. 3DO tried to sell a console into a market that Sony was taking, and Digital Chocolate tried to sell phone games through a channel Apple removed. Both times the read on where players were going was correct and the read on who would control the door was not.

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