Social game-maker OMGPOP says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.
Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated (like a zombie), then their friends are supposed to guess what it is.
Players have already created more than 20 million drawings, Porter says. The game’s average load is now 50 drawings per second, and where the company took nine days to reach its first 10 million drawings, it’s now seeing 10 million new drawings every 24 hours. The main driver of that growth? Porter says it’s Twitter and Instagram, where users post their drawings and look for other people to play.
And he says the game is already seeing five figures in revenue per day. OMGPOP runs ads in the free version of the game, and Porter says the biggest source of revenue is actually users upgrading from free to the ad-free, paid version. The game also makes money through virtual goods, like bombs, which help with guesses and also give players better words to draw.
The game is available on both on iOS and Android, but iOS supposedly accounts for 85 percent of installs and 90 percent of revenue.
There have been some mistakes too. Porter says OMGPOP had to remove its original cap of 100 turns per game, when it realized that games were going for longer than that. It’s also a challenge to store the rapidly growing number of drawings, he says.
The success of Draw Something also confirms a broader shift in OMGPOP’s strategy. We covered the company’s first mobile game Puppy World in August 2011, and now Porter says he’s fully committed to mobile.
“When we started in 2008, we focused on socializing traditional arcade style games on the web,” he says. “As Facebook grew as a game platform we moved to Facebook and we did OK. Now though that we have reoriented to creating truly social game experiences on mobile – iOS and Android – we have locked down our strategy, socializing mobile games, and we are having monster success with it. We want to be the #1 competitor to Zynga with Friends and eventually pass them.”
OMGPOP (formerly known as iminlikewithyou) developer and publisher of multiplayer, social and mobile games. The Company started in 2006 as iminlikewithyou, a place for people to play games to meet each other and in 2009 changed its name to the shorter OMGPOP where people meet each other to play games. It launched OMGPOP.com at that time. The company has generated about 1 Billion game plays to date. It has 20+ casual multiplayer flash games on OMGPOP.com. It released 5 Facebook games to...
Dan Porter is CEO of the social games company OMGPOP. With millions of active users across iPhone, Android, Facebook and the web the Company is actively releasing over 10 games a year across these platforms. OMGPOP is located in New York City, Previously he was the SVP corporate development managing investments for Richard Branson and the Virgin Group. Dan started out working with bands at RCA Records, was a public school teacher and President of the Teach For America program...
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