BlueGiant Interactive, best known for PC strategy games Tryst and APOX Legend, is making its way to Android and iOS by way of Kii Game Cloud Platform. Vinnie Reddy, CEO of the independent game studio, chose Kii to keep his business competitive.

Welcoming a new age of game development

Console and handheld sales are waning while mobile and online game revenue projections steeply climb. Despite the promising industry outlook, it’s difficult for smaller studios, even those helmed by experienced game developers, to transition to mobile. Reddy, who was a motion capture technician at Animazoo UK prior to founding BlueGiant in 2007, explains, “Our team is highly skilled in building games and content. Coming from a PC development background, though, we didn’t have the experience and expertise in managing mobile games. We needed a partner to help us with user and data management, and also provide analytics on the backend. Kii provides a complete solution.”

Identifying platform players

Reddy first encountered Kii walking the expo floor at an AppsWorld conference where he caught a demo of Kii Game Cloud at the Unity game engine booth. Intrigued and impressed, he asked the Kii platform evangelists a few questions and later went online to learn more. “With a small team it’s a challenge to run, manage and develop all of our own servers. That was the biggest problem we were looking to solve. We ended up evaluating Kii and two competitors, one based in the United States and the other in India.”

When asked why he didn’t choose a company closer to home, Reddy replies, “I would have loved to work with a local Indian company, but its product wasn’t mature or specific enough. It didn’t have separate products to meet the needs of apps and games. Everything was treated the same way.”

He quickly eliminated the U.S. competitor based on technical constraints. “They’re very popular with small developers, but extremely limited for the types of games we wanted to develop. We want all of our active users to be able to communicate with each other, whether we’re seeing 10,000 players or 100,000. Having 10,000 on one server and 10,000 on another wasn’t going to work for us. We wanted something instantly scalable. We wanted high or unlimited bursts. With Kii Game Cloud, scale is there for whatever we want to do. It’s a cutting-edge solution with everything we were looking for and more.”

Flexible features, easy integration

With Kii platform now integrated into several pre-release games, Reddy is feeling good about his studio’s partnership with Kii. “Our developers are very familiar with Unity and there were no surprises with the Kii Unity SDK. The Kii platform definitely takes the pressure off our shoulders so we can spend more of time and energy creating games.”

Reddy is also a big fan of the flexibility to pick and choose features based on game requirements. “Kii is very customizable. We look at each feature to see how it will fit in the game and that determines how we implement. It really depends on the game and what it needs to do. Right now we’re looking at how we can take advantage of A/B testing and working with our developers to incorporate Kii China Services into our plans.”

Exceptional customer experience

With so many companies today focused on sign ups over customer satisfaction, Reddy feels one of the biggest benefits of working with Kii versus other companies is attitude. “Right from the beginning I could tell Kii was different. From the first contact everyone was friendly and positive, really helping us. They weren’t there just to provide services. They were looking at what it would take to make us successful.”

For the future, that vision of success includes developing BlueGiant Interactive games specifically for India. “Thinking ahead, our ideal is to create interactive content that resonates with our Indian culture, telling our stories with rich characters. Within the mobile space, nobody’s really doing it well.”

We look forward to helping bring that vision to life.