Anyone who played Pokémon GO near launch will know the name “PokéVision,” a mapping/tracking service that let players find rare spawns near them, with Niantic’s in-game tracker rendered useless and broken last summer.
While Niantic eventually purged the game of all its third party scanning services, PokéVision remains the stuff of legend in Pokémon GO lore, but most people may not have known who built it. The team was young, and only three people, Yang Liu, 25, Jeremiah Rodriguez, 23 and Anthony S., 23. But in the year since PokéVision, the three have gone on to do something even more impressive, attracting more than 12 million players to their browser games, Zombs.io and Spinz.io in just over a month since they launched.
The games have been an explosive success fueled mainly by YouTubers, with even the likes of PewDiePie and Jacksepticeye playing their games for their millions of followers. This has led to a good amount of revenue in a short time, but also complications with scaling and being ripped off by clones.
It’s a pretty interesting tale of how they got from PokéVision to 12 million monthly players in short order, and I recently spoke with Yang Liu about what the entire process has been like. It’s a good read for anyone considering dabbling in game dev with limited prior experience.
How did you meet your team? How did you come to start work on PokéVision?
LIU: The PokéVision team was three of us - me, Jeremiah and Anthony. Jeremiah met online in a FPS video game over 10 years ago in 2004, and we’ve been playing games and working on gaming projects together since. We met Anthony a few years back on another online game and all three of us have worked together since. One of our first projects together was MasterOverwatch - a player performance and analytics site for the game Overwatch; we made that in May 2016.
The PokéVision came about pretty organically I would say. We were just playing the game and all of a sudden one day, the in-game Pokémon “tracker” was broken. All three of us were playing Pokémon GO at the time, and with the tracker broken, it left us blindly looking for Pokémon - which was quite frustrating. Jeremiah, who focuses on backend programming, decided to dig into the Pokémon GO code a little bit and saw that the information was still being sent, just not exposed for some reason. We made PokéVision the day that he looked into it and we shared it amongst our friends. We didn’t have any expectations for it, but our friends shared it with theirs and it spread from there. We had over a million users within 24 hours, and by that time, ironically, we had to stop playing Pokémon GO to support PokéVision. It kept growing from there, hitting milestones like 10 million users per day by day five. Towards the end of PokéVision, we had over 15 million users per day, and a total of over 85 million total unique users who used the site, which was over a span of 10 days. It was even crazier seeing that we had over 500,000 people peak on the site concurrently!
Since then, we’ve had a lot of wonderful opportunities meeting people who wanted to hear about how PokéVision came about -- including Esri, the mapping company from Redlands, CA, - who generously provided us with their map API that ran PokéVision. After PokéVision ended, we traveled to California for a meet up and we stopped by Esri’s headquarters to thank the guys who helped us during PokéVision in person. Jack Dangermond, who built the company from scratch with his wife Laura, spent a few hours giving us a tour of their campus.
How did you transition from PokéVision to game dev?
Jack, who expressed that he didn’t really play games, said that PokéVision (and Pokémon GO) caught his eye because it brought hundreds of millions of people around the world together and made them curious about their surroundings. He was very interested in the idea that something like a video game caused people to explore and enjoy the world that they otherwise wouldn’t have without Pokémon GO. So when he said something along the lines of “hey, Esri is an enterprise company and we don’t really have intentions of making anything consumer facing like a video game...but do you have any ideas on how our technology can be applied so that more people would be encouraged to just go out and enjoy the world, much like they did in Pokémon GO?”
It was then that I realized that if we were actually capable of making video games, and we had the ability to leverage Esri’s technology into something as cool as Pokémon GO to connect the world, then that would be something we’d love to explore. So that, combined with the fact that all three of us love video games (and met on them), we had it since that day that we wanted to try out game development at some point, and this year just seemed like the right opportunity. Maybe we’d be able to make the next big AR, geo-location game?
Can you define the .io platform?
I think the “.io platform” is just what most people recognize 2D, online, browser, multiplayer games as. It all started with Agar.io, then Slither.io and more have come out. I think the main pattern is that it’s an easily accessible, online multiplayer, ephemeral, experience that you can enjoy in a browser.
What was the inspiration for Zombs.io? Why use this platform instead of heading straight for mobile?
Zombs.io was our very first attempt at making a video game. We really enjoyed Agar.io and Slither.io, but those games felt very ephemeral and short lived; on top of seeing if we were capable of making games, and capable of designing concepts that other people like, we also wanted to see if we can innovate this “io games” platform some more by introducing a new game that kept the core ease-of-access, multiplayer aspect, but also introduce some more depth and strategy at the same time.
We had zero expectations for it, and since we were primarily web developers, it only felt right to develop on a platform we were most familiar with. On top of that, Facebook has been investing in HTML5 games (as well as other investors), so, in some way, we perceived web games making a “comeback,” so to speak.
The design of Zombs came from my personal love of tower defense games + idle clicker games. I wanted to make a game that made you feel excited when surrounded by zombies and also allowing you to mow them down. At the same time, I liked the concept of gradual progression from games like Cookie Clicker, so I introduced the “gold mines” system that you upgrade and passively earn gold. In addition to us three, my sister Michelle (17) - who also worked on PokéVision -- designed a significant portion of the art/design in Zombs and also the UI for Spinz.
Lastly, and most importantly, we wanted it to have a massive multiplayer feel. Not single, duo or even 4 player co-op, we wanted to be able to see and feel the presence of 100 other people in a server all building bases, all defending their base against zombies. I think that’s what gave it a lot of life.
To our surprise, within a week, we hit a million players, and so far in the past 45 days, we’ve had over 5M aggregate players and growing strong.
How did Spinz.io spin out of this (pun certainly intended)?
After a week into Zombs’ launch, we realized that we forgot a really critical system - account progression. Currently, when you die or leave the game, your progress gets completely reset and you have to start all over the next time you play (which people, surprisingly, enjoy). However, we had quite a bit of goals we wanted to achieve with Zombs, and we needed a way to save people’s progress. As Zombs had too many moving parts, we decided it might’ve been better to build an entirely new game just to make sure the account system is stable before introducing it to Zombs….so we came up with Spinz. Part of the of the idea came from the fidget spinner trend of course, and the other part came from the Beyblade phenomenon in the 90s… and Spinz.io was born.
How on earth did you manage to get 12 million players across these games in a month?
I have no idea! We posted it onto one of those “io games” sites (similar to Miniclip, but for io games - there’s quite a few of them out there, but we posted it on one), and it took off from there. We have a few social media accounts with over 1M followers (such as PokéVision), as well as our other media sites (MasterOverwatch), but we really wanted to grow it organically. The whole goal of Zombs and Spinz was to see that even if we did manage to make a game - was it going to be something that people naturally liked? Was it something that we’d still have a passion for and not be tired of after it gains some traction? These games growing organically was really core to the purpose of our experiment so we let it grow that way.
All the YouTubers and content creators, big or small, made a huge difference of course in our games’ discoveries. From Pewdiepie, to Jackseptic, to ones with a few hundred subscribers on YouTube - they all helped these games grow virally and we have a lot to thank them for. I had a buddy ask me on Facebook (he’s in the gaming industry too), “How much did you pay these guys to play your game?” And it was at that moment I realized just how lucky we were to have these games be picked up by all these content creators.
In terms of that viral spread, can you figure out a Patient Zero for how these games exploded?
None at all, I think word of mouth was the key factor here. Just as I couldn’t really explain PokéVision's growth. I should really probably figure that out, huh?
What advice would you give to those trying to replicate your success with these titles?
I think everyone who’s played a game has wanted, at some point, to make one of their own. It’s super hard to do so, and a lot of people rush into it. My biggest advice, from personal experience, would be to absorb your own experiences with games and apply what you think would be fun to your own concepts.
What are some of the challenges you’ve come across with your games getting so popular so quickly?
Scaling is always hard. In the first few days, we had our games on AWS (Amazon Web Services), and it cost us up to $5,000 per day to run. Monetization was the last thing on our mind, so we weren’t even monetizing our games in the first few days. That was one of the challenges - we’ve found a cheaper solution since then, so I’m glad that’s resolved.
When it comes to gaming, I think you always have to think about distributing your game on a different platform and replicating that traction. We haven’t touched mobile yet, but it’s something we’re working on. Because of how fast these games have grown and caught the attention of many people ,we’ve seen a lot of clones already - some have amassed over a million downloads, EACH, on the Google play/ iOS app store (took Spinz assets + name). It’s just how the industry is, but it’s quite an annoying challenge to try to take down clones.
What’s revenue like for these games? Does it encourage you to move into game dev full-time?
We’re focused on growth over monetization right now so our numbers might be off; however, I can say that the revenue is sustainable for it to be full-time if done right. I don’t think we’re quite there yet though. Our other businesses are relatively low-maintenance, so for now, we are actually full-time to see if we can make some cooler games!
What are your future plans for both Zombs and Spinz, and what other games to you have in development?
I would considering Zombs 10% complete. With that said, we have a ton of updates and improvements to come in the upcoming weeks. These updates give us an opportunity to test concepts and a better understanding of our users for our next potential games. Spinz.io we’ll also be updating. We’ve recently come up with a new team mode for the game.
I personally think Zombs has the biggest potential due to all the cool things we can explore in game with the zombies, the towers, and massive multiplayer interactions. We definitely want to focus on that a bit more before we move on with our next game.
It may be a bit early to say, but our ultimate goal would be to create an AAA game one day. I think combined with the experiences we’ve had in the gaming industry in the past few years and the traction on Zombs.io and Spinz.io, we want to hone our game development skills right now and eventually reach that goal.
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Play Zombs.io and Spinz.io for yourself.
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