MusiGames, The Challenges of Starting a Game Studio in South America

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-musi-games.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at GDC Online and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Americo: My name is Americo. I’m from MusiGames, a Brazilian game studio that we are focusing more on music applications and music fun for interaction.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about how your studio got started. What inspired you to get into music games?

Americo: That’s a good question. Actually, our company as a company, we started 10 years ago doing music applications for people who are learning how to play guitar, drum, keyboards. In 2008 we were led by Guitar Hero, Rock Band and that kind of stuff.

And all of our programmers were saying, “Why are we only doing educational stuff? Let’s try to do something more fun.” Basically, we decided to create a division inside of the company, and we call this division, MusiGames. It was in the beginning, three guys only. And we started to learn about the game market and what we would do in this market.

What ended up happening was that we really focused on music games, and we started to work with iPhone applications in 2009. So, basically our first game release was Drums Challenge. It was in June of 2009, and we got to the top five music games app in the U. S., UK, Germany and several other countries.

Since then, we have been developing music game, like iMusic Puzzle. And one of the things that we really tried to do in the studio is to put unique features in the music games. So, we’re doing music games that you can play with any song. Like iMusic Puzzle, you can play with any song that’s in your iTunes Library. So, if you have 2,000 songs, every time you play it’s going to be a different game, a different experience.

Interviewer: Awesome.

Americo: And that comes from our computer music backgrounds.

Interviewer: Yeah. Let’s talk about your computer music backgrounds. So, you started out doing software to inspire people to learn music then. Was that the original idea, or did you… Is that because you guys were passionate about it, or was it some other reason?

Americo: The company started as Jordano which is my partner. He was trying to learn music in Brazil, and his mother sent him to school that had a formal education in music, and that was really boring. And so, he ended up learning different instruments by himself. So, when he got into the university he had that desire to work with computer music, and there was no company in Brazil that did software. So, basically he founded the company in 2001.

His idea from the beginning was to make the learning process easier for anyone. So, you could look at the computer. The computer would show you how to play and then you would play, pretty similar to what today we have in the music games.

Interviewer: You know what’s interesting is that you started back then and with the aspiration of actually get people to learn music via computers and stuff like that. And then, you see this thing like Rock Band take off. What were you guys thinking at that point because Rock Band became a billion dollar, multibillion dollar product or Guitar Hero, Rock Band, stuff like that.

At that point, were you guys thinking that… Were you even thinking about games before that even happened, or did you just realize that or recognize that it would be nice if the power of games would actually inspire is a better medium for people to learn and to embrace music.

Americo: That’s a good question and the way we saw that stuff coming out of it, what didn’t we do that?

Interviewer: I think that’s important for smaller developers where sometimes they just miss these opportunities. What questions would you have asked, or what techniques or habits would you wish you would have had back then so that you would have caught that trend?

Americo: For us, specifically, we were focused on the software market. So, we were very focused on getting to music websites to promote our products, our educational software. And in talking to publishers from the educational field, I think the main problem for us was that we weren’t looking at the broad market spectrum.

We weren’t analyzing things that were working world wide, so that’s why we missed the opportunity back then because technically we had all the capability to do that kind of stuff. But we were focusing on a different niche, a different market.

Interviewer: So, other game developers listening, so now what you do is you see what’s working in other different industries and, maybe, see how you can borrow from that and apply to what you’re doing.

Americo: For sure. I think that’s the most important thing that the management level has to do. He has to have a shortage outlook on what’s going on in the world. For us what helped us to have a little bit of insight was when the two entrepreneurs, me and Jordano, we started having more people to work with us. And we started to get more time to get out of the day to day business activities, and we started to look at the strategic level of the company on the market.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about strategy then. When you say strategic level, can you talk about exactly what you mean? Day to day, OK, when you say day to day you’re talking like maintaining code and stuff like that, but what do you mean by strategy and when did you feel that you first started thinking about strategy for the company?

Americo: I think it really started in 2007 when we got to a moment where we had 15 educational software on the market, and we said, “What are we going to do now?” We had guitar. We had flute. We had drums. We had everything.

And then we said, “OK. We need to figure out what will be the next steps.” So, we really started to research the markets. We researched the software market. Nothing really came out of it. We researched the game market. Guitar Hero was happening at that time, and basically we decided that we were going to put some money and some risk in the game market.

From this point on I was taken out of the day to day jobs, and they gave me the responsibility to direct the games division. So, basically, at the end of the day what do I do daily? I read the news about the game market. I try to speak with publishers as much as I can, and basically on the overall I think the most important stuff to have is to have someone doing this, even if it’s not the founder of the company. But you have to have someone good on the marketing side, on the strategy side.

Interviewer: Do you then just talk about strategy with your other partner all the time, or how does that work?

Americo: At that time we were three partners in the company. What happened was that we managed to create a business plan for the game division, the music games division, and we went out to look for venture capital and funds for starting the studio. We were only three people there.

So, basically, we got some funds from the Brazilian Innovation Agency. We had a project to do with music games that are played with any song. After that, we got money for the development, so we had money to hire 10 people, 15 people to do the games and do the software behind it. But we didn’t have money for marketing, for infrastructure, for PR and for everything that’s also needed.

We spent all of the year of 2008 speaking with venture capital funds in Brazil, and in Brazil it’s really tough to have a venture capital fund working with game developers because they don’t understand the game market really well. The game market didn’t really exist in Brazil at that time, so we ended up in 2009 conversing with a venture capital fund that they started in 2008.

We spent one year negotiating with them and how they would get into the company and how the company would be organized after then. Basically, what happened was they entered in MusiGames in February of 2010, and then we started a company build-up process.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the growth challenges of building up your company because you’re kind of like this small indie studio to an extent, and now you’re expanding. How did that happen? How did that work, and what were some of the lessons learned?

Americo: As far as the game studio that was ours, the main challenge was to go as fast as you can so that you can compete because there are millions of game studios doing iPhone games and social games. For us, we have a very aggressive business plan for the next five years that, of course, the venture capital guys are putting money in for us to execute it.

One of the things that we were trying to do there is have everyone in the studio aligned with our objectives, with our goals. We are trying to implement human resource management way in that we are going to reward our employees on the results that they generate. So, basically, right now we have a bonus plan. Once we do a game that reaches 50,000 unique sales, we’re going to give everyone that worked on the project a weekend in the beach there in Brazil.

So, they have some really goals, nice goals on the projects. Each goal is associated with more income that they receive and awards, so basically that’s something that we’re trying to do there.

Interviewer What about managing the people? How do you deal with that, and how does that give you time to do strategy? I mean, so what’s…

Americo: That’s crazy because we were 10 people, and now we’re 30. What happened was that at one point in 2009 we were hiring, hiring, hiring. And then, after you hire so much people, you have to manage them well. I am the CEO and my partner’s the CTO. We couldn’t directly manage all of them, of course.

So, basically, we broke the studio in teams. We had three teams right now there, two iPhone teams-not iPhone, Smart Phone teams, and one social games team. We hired a Projects Manager. So, she oversees the work of these three teams on a daily to daily basis. So, she manages the schedules, the deliveries, the quality and everything.

We are more meeting with the teams, like weekly, when they release something we get to play, and then we give them feedback. That’s the way it’s working right now for us.

Interviewer: In 2009 you started releasing these iPhone and social games. Can you talk more about them and the games that you did release and the response?

Americo: Actually, when we started doing iPhone, we were researching. And our first game was Drums Challenge. It was an idea from one of our programmers. He came to us and he said, “I want to do this and this” and he explained the idea. The game’s a mixture of music, memory and rhythm games.

So, basically, we kind of started as a test, and we released the game after three months of development. We had a small team of four people, and the game started to sell, more or less, but at some point Apple started to promote it. So, it kicked off and it sold a lot, and once we understood how the market worked we started creating other games.

Basically, we focused entirely on the first year in 2009 to create a portfolio of titles. So we had the Drums Challenge, iMusic Puzzle, Paper Boat Race, Mixbox and other titles. Our main strategy was to create a portfolio of things to show to the publishers so that they can know what we’re capable of doing. Then, we can start working together with them.

Interviewer: Why go through publishers? Why not self-publish? Apple really doesn’t care per se about whether you’re a game developer or some other software company. For them, it doesn’t matter. So, why go through a publisher?

Americo: That’s a tricky question. For us, what we figured out with these six games that we released as a portfolio building strategy, some of them were promoted by Apple and when they were promoted they sold. The other ones that weren’t promoted, we tried to promote by ourselves. At some points we did OK, but they really didn’t pick up.

So, there is a big challenge in the Apple store today which is getting promoted and getting visibility because there are millions of games there. So, one of the things that we want to achieve with the publisher is that they help us in the marketing. Right now, we are in a position that we have money for marketing, but we’re not sure how’s the best way to use this money, to be honest.

So, we want the publishers to come on board with us because they’re experts in PR and marketing and showing to Apple the good stuff of the games. So, that’s why we’re working with them. We have worked with Chillingo up to now and Pokepix. They have done good jobs, but we’re still doing more stuff with them.

Interviewer: Why not just stick to the games that Apple’s promoting. Why not just stick with them and just do daily, or weekly, iterations. Some games like Pocket God, what they do is they just released one game and just kept on iterating and iterating, and they sold millions of copies. Why not do that? Why did you go with the strategy of doing multiple games over the course of the year?

Americo: On the beginning when we released Drums Challenge, we released it and then what’s going to happen? I think we released three updates after a while, but on that time there weren’t enough pay purchases specifically, and the concept of Pocket God wasn’t really on our radar. So, we weren’t thinking of doing games like that, like on a volunteer basis.

What happened was to date on the two games that we were working on, one is really a developed one. So, we’re going to release it at 30 or 40 levels, and then our plan is to add 5 levels per week. So, that’s something that’s going to happen. On the other one we are going to have lots more of Apple purchases. So, we already put it on Drums Challenge after some months, and on the next ones we’re considering this, which is very interesting.

Interviewer: So ? purchases, can you talk about that more. Is that a better business model?

Americo: For us, it’s kind of a complimentary business model. On the Drums Challenge, for example, we have millions of people who have downloaded it, and the Apple store they’re really not generating a lot of money, but they’re keeping the people playing. So, at some point it’s important for us because we’re cementing the relationship with our players.

Basically, we try to get a mixture of paid stuff and free upgrades. So, we’re not talking about ?. It means new songs that can be played in the game, so we release some for free and some for paid.

Interviewer: When you talk about songs, are these indie songs, or are these famous songs? How are you getting these songs?

Americo: For Drums Challenge specifically, it’s songs that we create in-house. We have two musicians there because it’s a memory and rhythm game. So, basically, the players are drumming on drum kits and then you have to repeat that. On other games, like iMusic Puzzle, which we have the idea that you can play with any song that you have on your library. It is really up to you.

Interviewer: Now, you mentioned social games. What are you going to do in terms of music in social games, or do you want to get away from music when you’re doing social games? What’s the strategy there?

Americo: That’s a question that we’re still trying to answer in the company. What we’re doing there, in January of 2010 we created a social games theme in parallel of the other two ones, and we started to do a music game, a music social game for Facebook. Right now we haven’t released this game yet. We’re speaking with some publisher that will probably release it with us.

We are also working on an Orkut game. Orkut is the Facebook of Brazil. So, we have worked with Orkut before. On the musical education side we have a music application there. But on this game specifically we’re targeting the Brazilian public and audience. We’re really trying to stay focused on the music game, but our team, our creative team is popping up with ideas for other kind of social games.

Interviewer: How do you balance that strategy? You guys want to be known for music games, and then you have, obviously, and this usually happens anyways is you have people on your team who want to do other types of games. What do you do? I mean, do you just say stick to the strategy, or do you do 90 percent of your core strategy, 10 percent experimentation? What is the best thing that you’ve seen work for your studio?

Americo: That’s something really tricky and that includes something that sometimes affects the motivation of the team because some of the guys, they were doing DS games before and some others were doing PC downloadable stuff. But when we speak with developers, I think that 90 percent of them, they always want to do a Playstation 3 games or Xbox and whatever.

But for a company like ours, it doesn’t really make sense. On a daily basis we try to keep our ears open for new ideas, and the recent guideline that we gave to them is we’re looking for iPhone and social games. If you have any idea about this, tell us. And then, sometimes we have brainstorming meetings. So, we’re not really throwing ideas away. In the beginning if it’s on the platforms that we already know how to do and we’re doing stuff, that’s pretty much how we are.

Interviewer: What language are these games aimed at? Since you’re from Brazil, do you target the English audience? Do you target the Spanish audience?

Americo: That’s a good question. From the beginning we were only targeting U. S. and Europe. So, Drums Challenge and iMusic Puzzle, they’re all in English. Of course, for this Orkut game that we’re working on, it’ll be our first test in Orkut. It’s to be in Portuguese. One thing that we have in our software time there is that everything is easily localized. So, at some point if some opportunity arises for us, localizing to Spanish will be easier.

Interviewer: In Facebook you see a lot of these games that are first introduced in Spanish. So, I wasn’t sure if that was something you guys considered or if… I don’t know about Portuguese versus Spanish, how easy it is even.

Americo: We can understand the Spanish guys really perfectly, but they can’t understand us. So, that’s a problem. On the Facebook side of the things, we are really in touch with some publishers, and that’s something that we’re really putting on the publisher’s hand. If they feel that it’s very important to have a Spanish version or German or whatever, we’re going to localize it.

In the technical point of view, the thing that you have is you have to make things and localize it, localizable so that once the publisher decides to do it, that’s it.

Interviewer: Orkut, is that going up? Is that staying the same in Brazil, or is Facebook taking over? What’s the perspective from Brazil?

Americo: That’s a good question. Orkut in Brazil, I would say that it’s spread across all kind of people, all regions of Brazil geographically speaking and also on all levels of income per population. We have middle class people who use the Orkut. We have the high class people use the Orkut. We have poor people use the Orkut.

What I’m seeing, this is really just a feeling I don’t have any data to back this. But what I’m seeing is that the high middle class and high class, they are starting to use Facebook, and I think it’s something that’s going to happen. They want to get away of the full amount of people to something more private. So, I think Facebook will grow a little bit there on the next few months.

Interviewer: How is it to be a game developer in Brazil? Is that every something people understand? How big are games in Brazil?

Americo: Great.

Interviewer: Can you talk about that?

Americo: We have around 30 companies in Brazil doing games. In our city we are located in Recife. We have a technology park. Part of it is digital, and it’s important that we have 150 companies, IT companies. From this 100 and whatever, we have seven game companies. So, some guys are doing adware games. Other guys are doing MMOs, soccer MMOs. Other guys are doing music games. Basically, in Brazil the development community is very small.

Interviewer: Sure.

Interviewer: We have an association. It’s called Abra Games where we meet together, and this association tries to do some stuff with the government, like in traditional Game Connection or GDC San Francisco, they have a booth for all the companies to go and meet other people. It’s a small community, and one of the biggest problems that you have in Brazil is that in Brazil games, they have very high taxation.

So, if you want to buy a PS3 game in Brazil, it will cost like four times what it costs here in U. S. So, we don’t have a real internal market, and that forces the companies to look overseas. All the developers are probably doing stuff for U. S. and now Europe.

Interviewer: What about Orkut? Orkut seems to be a place where there are games like Buddy Poke and stuff like that. Is that introducing people to games or are people are just still not picking them up because of that high cost because virtual currency probably has the same taxation.

Americo: Virtual currency doesn’t have the same taxation.

Interviewer: Oh, it doesn’t.

Americo: So, if we want to sell virtual currency for my game, I will pay the same as if I’m selling regular software. So, it’s OK. What happened was that our users didn’t take Orkut in a serious way until now. So, it’s starting to build up as we are working with it.

Interviewer: Can you explain why Brazil then… So, you’re saying Brazil is purposely taxing games a lot more than other items?

Americo: Actually, it’s not really games. We have a very complicated tax system in the country as a whole. But for instance, the problems that the consoles and the games, they were not included in the law. They did three years ago what is called the IT law. This IT law was dedicated to reducing the taxes and the costs of IT stuff, so notebooks in Brazil today are cheap.

But since console games stayed out of it, we couldn’t really reduce it. So, there is a huge fight there in Brasilia, our capital, to put the games inside of the IT law so that we can reduce the prices. I hope we will make it.

Interviewer: You’re saying, when you walk around Brazil a lot of people don’t necessarily even get to play your games. How do you do testing there, and what are some of the other challenges of that?

Americo: That’s really challenging for us. What you have in Brazil in being honest with you is a piracy. So, everyone plays PS2, PS3 and whatever and Wii, but they don’t buy the games.

Interviewer: What you say they’re playing more online or on these consoles?

Americo: I think they are playing more and more online. But the consoles, they still have an appeal with the audience there. In terms of testing, since we are doing iPhone stuff, we are really in a niche way there in Brazil. What we try to do is we have internal tests and we have a beta team that is open to any people that sometimes we invite to our offices to play the games that are coming out. So, basically these interactives are building this team with people who have iPhone or iPods and they love games.

Interviewer: You’re developing for cell phones. Can you talk about the cell phone market in Brazil? How many people have Smart Phones there, and how popular is iPhone? How popular is Android?

Americo: The mobile phone in Brazil is big. We have around 110 million cell phones in Brazil, and Brazil has less than 200 million people. But the market for Smart Phones is still small. iPhone there is still small because it’s so expensive in Brazil. It’s not in the IT law, also.

Interviewer: Oh, it isn’t. Yeah.

Americo: So, you have the iPhone is very expensive there. But in Brazil we have many and many Nokia Smart Phones. So, we are starting to work with Nokia to get some of our games there.

Interviewer: Is that the J2ME platform, or is that…

Americo: They have lots of J2, but we are targeting more the new stuff, Symbian 2 and Symbian 3.

Interviewer: OK.

Americo: There is Nokia there, and there are a couple of others. I would say that this is a real market that will grow in the next two years because as Brazil’s economy is growing and as people are having more income, they will certainly buy more Smart Phones.

Interviewer: With that said, where’s the future of your studio going then? Are you going to focus on music games for Europe and U. S? Are you going to focus on Brazil and South American countries? What?

Americo: That’s a good question. I don’t know exactly the answer, but what I know is that we are putting a lot of effort into building a Brazilian user base because we see a value need, and probably our strategy says if we’re strong in Brazil it will make our company more valuable in the long-term. So, we’re definitely committed to do this.

But on the other side we can’t forget the day to day business, and the day to day business is done with U. S. and Europe revenues. Probably, we’re going to keep wanting to focus on Brazil and two or three teams working on the other stuff.

Interviewer: Then, what would you say for other developers who are starting out and they want to succeed? They want to figure out the financials and some of the other… They want to get through that learning curve of the logistics and all of these other things they need to learn.

What suggestions do you have so that a small developer or a small team can actually make a sustainable studio, a sustainable game studio?

Americo: That’s a good question. I think the first thing for a small developer or a person which is starting game development is to really get an understanding of where he’s fitting in. So, if you’re trying to do iPhone games, you have to play lots of iPhone games. You have to be reading all the iPhone games blogs and things so that you can have a good idea of what’s going on.

Interviewer: Is that something you guys do now?

Americo: Yeah. And that’s something I do daily. I’m always reading iPhone stuff, Facebook stuff and Orkut stuff. This gives me a better view also of what’s coming. So, for example, when iPad was announced and Apple put in an open API for developing for it, I met with our team there and I said, “Guys, we need to have Drums Challenge on iPad first thing” because Apple was just going to promote iPad stuff on the next month.

And that really happened because when Apple released iPad, all of the guys in Apple were only focusing on iPad because Steve Jobs was talking about that one day that he had to make it a success.

Basically, we released Drums Challenge two days after the iPad was released. We probably got the first iPad in Brazil. One friend shipped it to us by FedEx for us to test it, and it was great because it was promoted by Apple. It sold a lot, and it was a game that was released one year ago for iPhone.

So, that probably wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t paying attention to everything, if we weren’t talking to other studios and other publishers, and that was something that was very important. Meet all the other studios and meet the publishers because they have information that sometimes you can’t access. If you manage to develop a trust relationship with them, they will share this with you.

Interviewer: When you say, meet the developers, meet the publishers? Are you talking about going to conferences, or are you talking about talking to them online via email? What is the best way you do that, or do you go out of your way to meet developers in Brazil?

Americo: OK. I’m the business development manager of the company. So, how do I work in this direction? Some of the publishers I met them through LinkedIn. I just started looking for who are the guys who are managing the third party portfolios of the big publishers. And then, I started emailing those guys and trying to talk with them. Some of them replied. Some of them never replied.

We are always on the big conferences and shows, Game Connection in Lyon, GDC San Francisco, GDC Online here. What we try to do in these events is more like meeting them face to face and showing them our new stuff and trying to build a relationship. That’s the main thing.

Then, for us it’s kind of difficult because we’re in Brazil. So, I can’t be in Europe or the U. S. every week to talk with them and to get to them for some drinks, for example. We try to meet them as frequent as possible, and this show serves for that. So, that’s why three times a year we are on the shows.

What we also do is when they don’t go to the shows, I try to visit them in their offices. That’s also important.

Interviewer: And then, talking to other developers, how are you doing that?

Americo: That is more like an informal thing, and it really has mostly…

Interviewer: Mostly just other iPhone developers, or are you talking about just Brazilian developers?

Americo: No, we talk more with other iPhone developers than Brazil developers. I don’t know why. It’s really people that we meet on the shows that we develop a friendship-relationship, and then we end up talking with them and sharing experiences. And so, that’s pretty much it.

One thing that was interesting was we have contacted many developers through OpenFeint, their open game social platform. So, there are many developers there. Some of them we met through OpenFeint.

Interviewer: Any other, then, suggestions for developers out there? I mean, how do they deal with the change because things are changing so quickly? You’re focusing on iPhone today. Now, it just came out a few months ago that Android is outselling iPhone. So, what does that mean? How do you guys balance, like you said, your day to day with emerging opportunities, or do you have a strategy?

Americo: That’s a very important question. And that’s one of the most stress points that we have inside of our company today is that we have to be as fast and faster than the market because we need to grow. So, that impacts the way we create games. We usually have to have, OK, we are going to have this game and we have only four months to develop it and we need to do it.

Interviewer: Isn’t four months a really long time in this space?

Americo: In the beginning we felt it was a long time, but today we feel it’s not a long time. It’s too much time to do an iPhone game, for example. But on the other hand we have to balance the quality of the games. So, we’re now focusing on doing bigger games and more quality games, and this is taking longer than we anticipated.

We have two titles that we’re working on, like, six or seven months until now. One is for Android and iPhone, and the other one is just iPhone.

Interviewer: That seems to be a contradiction with your testing out of your strategy of evolving of products, get something simple out there and just evolve it over time because you actually build a bigger fan base that way instead of trying to make it high quality at first. Are you just going to try both strategies?

Americo: I think that the games we had sold very well. They sold because they had quality. They could have had better art, maybe, or they could have had more content on the beginning. But they were good games. On the other side, there is the challenge that in a game that wasn’t a top ten game but was top ten in a sub-category like music, there is a challenge, too. I’ll call them a middle so-so game to keep them alive because usually users, they forget the game.

At some point I think the continuous updates on the big games, the games that were the top five on the games category, they make sense because they have a very huge and solid base, like, 100,000 users that download all the updates and things like that. These make the game, actually.

But when you have 10,000 users that bought the game in the game history log or 20, it really doesn’t pick up when you do an upgrade. It doesn’t increase too much. So, I think it’s a great approach to improve your game once you have a game that’s broad in terms of audience. I guess that’s how I’m feeling.

Interviewer: Anything else moving forward that you guys are going to do? What about game play? How much time do you invest in that? Do you feel that you already have the core game component or game play for your music titles moving forward, or do you experiment?

Americo: That’s interesting because we are a music game developer, but we don’t want to do Guitar Hero. That’s a tricky thing because we’re always trying to push harder to what are we going to do. In most of the ideas that came to us, came from our own team. What we tried to do there is we tried to incentivate them to do as much prototypes as possible.

So, right now I think we have two games under prototyping. And for the prototyping, sometimes we put only one guy to do the prototype. And, maybe, it’s done in Flash and graphics, just for us to test the game play. Sometimes, these prototypes prove this is fun even with very strange art, even if not good songs. So, then we evolve the game and we really put it on the pipeline. And after some months, it’s really good. So, basically we set to prototyping a lot so that we can find new ways to interact with the music and the games.

Interviewer: How often or how frequently are you doing this prototyping? Is it every week, a little time every week? Is it every month? How often?

Americo: One of the titles that we are working on right now, we prototyped it for four months. One guy, one artist, one developer and one game designer, like, improving the game until we found that the game was OK and in a good grade stage, so we put it on production. We put it on more people inside of the team.

So, it really depends on the prototype. In some points it’s really clear that the idea works, and we can move on really fast. We can put a team to develop it. That was Drums Challenge, and that was iMusicPuzzle, but in other times we’re not so confident. So, we give them a little bit of more time to improve the concept and the game design so that we can say, OK, this really works.

Interviewer: And where can developers find out more information about your games or play your games?

Americo: They can check it out at musigames.com or just type MusiGames in Apple Store and probably in the next few months in Android Store, also. We are also coming on Symbian.

Interviewer: And how do you spell MusiGames, just…

Americo: M-U-S-I-games.com.