Victoria's growing reputation as a hotbed of online game development is about to get another boost with the opening of Kixeye's first Canadian studio early in the new year.
The San Francisco-based company - known for its Backyard Monsters, Battle Pirates and War Commander games - will open a studio under the guiding hand of Clayton Stark, who has jumped to Kixeye from Zynga Games.
"I can't overstate my excitement. ... This is my lifeblood,' said Stark who agreed to make the move after a crab dinner with Kixeye CEO Will Harbin. "What I'm passionate about is assembling a great team and building something the world hasn't seen before. That's what makes me tick."
Stark said he was convinced by promises of creative control and the chance to build the studio in Victoria. Stark had gone to San Francisco with his former company, Flock, when it was bought by Zynga in 2011, but was keen to return to Victoria and eventually did so and established a Zynga studio back in his hometown. Stark said Kix-eye is close to a deal for studio space in Bastion Square and plans to be up and running in January.
He did not want to be drawn into the controversy that has bubbled between Zynga and his new employers, Kixeye, and would only say it was time for him to move on.
"It is exciting to push forward with something more robust and bigger," he said. "You don't typically leave a job you have unless you don't like it and usually that's a period of low ebb and it's about getting back on the horse. It's important to be rejuvenated."
Stark is not the first executive to leave Zynga in recent months for Kixeye and other game developers. He wouldn't go into detail, but it's been widely reported Zynga has been losing senior talent and has launched lawsuits aimed at former staff leaving for companies like Kixeye.
Kixeye has also made no secret it has been aggressively growing and recruiting talent from the Bay area and beyond. It has even produced a risqué recruiting video, featuring CEO Will Harbin, that satirizes competitors like Zynga and Electronic Arts.
Kixeye's Victoria studio has already started recruiting as Stark is mining his long list of local contacts looking for engineers, artists and creative talent to fill out what he expects will be a 50-strong team by this time next year.
He doesn't expect to have trouble staffing the firm. "It may get a little 'messy' with the competition for talent, but I continue to believe there's enough technical and creative resources in Victoria to go around," he said.
The Victoria talent pool has been tagged as the main reason companies like Zynga, Microsoft and Game-house have established studios in Victoria, either by expansion or acquisition.
Stark said Kixeye should be able to attract talent because of the kind of work they will be doing. "It's cutting-edge technology. While we won't be building games initially, the technology that supports game development is pretty interesting to people," he said.
Kixeye has targeted hardcore gamers who look for real-time strategy games that offer an immersive experience, as opposed to Zynga's bread and butter, which has been people who play games like Farmville and Cityville aimed at an older, female demographic.
"What Kixeye is up to ... is taking on console [X-Box, Playstation] games head on through the [web] browser. The technology is such that you don't really need consoles to play console-quality games," said Stark. "We are after the traditional gamer who used to have to resort to expensive equipment. But where technology is today, it's completely reasonable to suggest the plastic box with a disk in it doesn't need to exist. Technology can deliver it over the web."
The news of Kixeye hitting town has been seen as both a challenge and validation by other local gaming companies. "We think it's awesome. ... It's a developer we know well and they have been really growing over the last year or so and trying to get that market share of mid-core gamers," said Tim Teh, co-founder of indie game development studio Kano/Apps.
Teh, whose company has grown from 15 to 22 people in the last six months, said because both firms develop similar games, it will force Kano/Apps to be on its toes. "But at the same time, increasing the visibility of gaming companies here - with Microsoft, Zynga, Kix-eye - it just proves we are in the right place to create games," he said.
