Interview: Bulkypix wants you to love them

No, I’m not dead. I’ve just been busy interviewing Bulkypix, also known as that one company you played that one game from that one time (unless you’re not a fan of Apple products, in which case probably not). In anticipation of their release of Another World 20th Anniversary Edition for iOS, we were begged asked to do an interview with Vincent Dondaine, COO and VP of Sales and Marketing for Bulkypix.

In the incredibly overpopulated* mobile gaming space, Bulkypix has many offerings such as Tiny Token Empires, Fruity Jelly, and Anooki Jump. If you’re like me, you don’t give a crap about any of those and are looking forward to seeing whether or not they’ve ruined the NES classic, Another World. While we’ll have to wait until it’s September 22 release to find out for sure, we did get a chance to find out a bit more about the studio behind it. Here’s what we found out.

T3:  Most of our readers are likely unfamiliar with you. Tell us briefly about your company.
Vincent: We founded Bulkypix in 2008 with 9 former Vivendi Games Mobile employees. They are a really strong team each with at least a half decade of experience under their belts in the gaming industries across a range kind of platforms. Before creating Bulkypix we had already worked on more than 70 published game titles. For my part, I was the senior producer on Crash Bandicoot Nitro one of the first best sellers for the iOS. The only one who hadn’t been a part of Vivendi is my associate and President of Bulkypix, Olivier Pierre. In less than 3 years we have successfyully published more than 60 games on iOS and we are quickly expanding into on other platforms like Android, Facebook, PC and connected TV. To date our main successes have been My Brute, Hysteria Project, Babel Rising and Pix N Love Rush.

T3:  What have you been looking to accomplish in the games you’ve released thus far?
Vincent: First and foremost to do what we love most : creating cool games that we like to play ourselves. We are a full team of gamers ranging from casual to hardcore. We are passionate in each of our favorite platforms and genres , so we’ve made attempts across many different styles from horror and suspense, to casual scoring games and retrogaming. Each style of game presents new challenges. It’s exciting to get to create games to represent the favorite types from each of our team members!

T3:  The mobile market is incredibly overpopulated at the moment. What differentiates you from everybody else in the space?
Vincent: To begin with, we’re different because we are developers as well as a genuine publisher (By that I mean we’ve developed our own games). Even if we move towards publishing a lot of games we are committed to continuing to develop games internally, to create innovative gameplay and new fun ways to entertain the players. Another way that we’re different is that we have a unique approach to publishing in comparison to our competitors. We foster a relationship style we’re calling “fair publishing” by only only receiving a 15 % cut of the revenues.  Your partners definitely need to live as if they were a part of your company; if you make them stronger you become stronger alongside them. As such we are also doing a lot of coproduction with our partners all around the world. It means creating a game and sharing everything (budget, development, risks, and ownership). We are creating real value in that partnership model for both companies. If the game is a huge success it’s not only for the publisher, it’s a real success for both parties. In that model it also mean that if you want to port the game to a particular platform, coproducers will continue to earn money on future ported versions even if they haven’t made the new port themselves. It’s really fair to all sides.

Another point of differentiation is the larger vision that we bring, I mean to be multiplatform from the beginning. You’re right ios is overpopulated and from the beginning you need to prepare yourself to struggle to be noticed. Your game could become huge if published on only one platform, but we bring the skills and the talents to make sure it has the best exposure as well as the ability to be carried across to a range of platforms and markets.

T3:  Do you have any plans to release games on non-mobile platforms?
Vincent: Sure we have it in mind but we are moving in tiny steps. In a first step we need to create strong new ip that we will be able to to well on other platforms. That’s what we’ve done in the cases of Hysteria Project and Pix N love Rush on PSP minis. We haven’t managed the publishing directly in those cases, however. We have to learn the business on those platforms, with our first focus to be excellent in the smartphone arena. We are also facing a real difficulty on consoles – the fact that on some of the classical consoles you need to have produced and released a boxed title before being able to be published in their digital stores. At the moment we have one dream, to see Hysteria Project with a X100 experience based on Kinect, pretty funny isn’t it ?

T3:  So you have any plans to release games for a more mature audience?
Vincent: We already created one with Hysteria Project, and like I just said, it’s a real dream for us to see the adventure continuing with HD movies, giving the real sensation of being in the movie using all of what Kinect can offer. We think that there is definitely room for that kind of game, and its really different from 3D games we are used to playing. We have endless possibilities when producing titles for a big screen. We have tons of crazy ideas, and definitely want to see that project come to fruition.

If you’re interested in finding out more about any of their games, be sure to check out their website. And if you’re a fan of old classics revamped for the mobile platforms, check out Another World 20th Anniversary for iPhone on the 22nd. Or be like me and ignore it because you don’t own an iPhone.

*Read: Full of crap