Gravity Bear was founded in 2008, but it wasn't until now that the social gaming company was ready to fully enter the market and talk about its plans to "deliver engaging original IPs across a variety of platforms and social networks." Gravity Bear will be led by industry veteran Phil Shenk, who was previously co-founder and Art Director at Flagship Studios. In the past, Shenk held high profile positions at Blizzard, where he worked as Lead Artist on Diablo 2 and later as the designer on Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. He also worked at Wild Tangent, where he directed internal and external teams building streaming games for browser-based 3D engines.
“Gravity Bear was formed with the singular aim of creating games that reconnect people to the core of gaming," said Shenk, who will serve as CEO of Gravity Bear. “Our commitment is to bring the caliber of social gaming experiences players want -- as they want them – which means delivering new kinds of excitement and fun that blend the latest in modern game design with fresh technology.”
Going from big scale, big budget, big development timelines, to casual social games is obviously a giant leap, but it's one that's increasingly common these days. Social gaming has become a huge phenomenon (look at Farmville, for example) and designers believe they can cash in. Shenk isn't looking to simply "cash in, " however. He truly believes that his team at Gravity Bear can bring some real innovation to the exploding casual/social games scene.
IndustryGamers caught up with Shenk to really dig into the social gaming trend and find out what Gravity Bear's plans entail. Here's our full Q&A:
IndustryGamers: We remember hearing about Gravity Bear already late last year. What's been going on at the company up to this point?
Phil Shenk: Well, we've been hard at work mostly. We spent a few months trying out different game ideas, researching the social networking and casual web space, and developing our core technology. Early this year we decided on the game concept that we thought would be a lot of fun to make, would slot in perfectly with our company vision, and have great potential for expansion and growth. We've been working like crazy on that idea ever since... everyone's really been having lots of fun and it's amazing how it's come together in the past few months.
IG: Who are the other founding members of Gravity Bear? How large is the team?
Phil Shenk: There are six core members, including myself... all from Flagship. There's me, my business partner Aletheia O'Neil, our Tech Director Kevin Klemmick, Bill Ko is Senior Art and Operations Manager, Alan Hu is Game Designer, and Ryan Rouse is our 2D and 3D Artist. We have an awesome team that we outsource our art to, and have used several contractors to help out here and there. Right now we've got a programmer Orion Elenzil that has been working with us onsite for the past month.
IG: Where is funding coming from for Gravity Bear?
Phil Shenk: We've been really fortunate with our funding situation given the state of the economy last year...very blessed on that front. Almost all of our funding is angel investment, and we are totally independent. We received a little early funding from other sources.
IG: Social gaming on networks like Facebook is getting bigger every day, but it's definitely more casual oriented. As a former Blizzard and Flagship designer, your games have been for a hardcore audience. What kind of approach will you take with games on social networks?
Phil Shenk: It's been very interesting watching and analyzing the trends these past 12 months. It's crazy how fast things are growing, and how compressed the generational product cycle is. When we first started out, Flash was just starting to appear, but most games were still html, very stat-based, no real interactive presence to them. Since then, there's been an explosive step-up in terms of quality, polish, and game design in nearly all the top products. Clearly, we're seeing that presentation and the depth-of-experience matters to broad audience on Social Networks. Take Facebook for example, I think we're probably in the third generation of Facebook games, getting ready to move into the fourth. This has happened in just a little over a year.
The tricky part is how far to push this quality and depth of experience... On the quality front, how many resources does one put into a game before it's not worth the ROI? In terms of sophisticated game mechanics, how much is too much for the broad market?
My theory is that the huge gaming audience on Social Networks doesn't slice up so neatly into casual vs hardcore... I don't think it's solely a question of what kind of game people will be attracted to, but more a matter of a huge audience looking for small slices of entertainment to break up the day. The most passionate core gamer still needs something to do while they're at work or between classes, just as much as the homemaker or office worker. Social games are filling this huge need that's historically been served by hanging out in the lunch room, IM conversations, browsing the web, checking out YouTube, etc.
But I think I know what you're asking... are we making Diablo for Facebook? No. Are we making a dark and gritty RPG shooter? No. Expect something different.
IG: Are you targeting only social networks or do you plan to branch out to iPhone and other platforms? Are consoles out of the picture for you now?
Phil Shenk: That's a good question, because I think some companies, people often mistake the platform for the possibility. It gets back to what I was talking about in the previous question. Games have historically been thought of this "Thing" that you sit down to "Do"... "OK, I'm going to go off to the den and play my game now.” /plop.
But now step back and consider another form of entertainment: reading. We don't only sit down to read a whole book. Sure a lot of us do that, but that represents a pretty big time commitment. There are so many other places that we read, and for entertainment specifically. We read blogs, emails and IMs and comic books. In Japan you'll see just about everyone reading some genre of manga... that's the reading analog to casual games. You take an activity like reading and package it in all kinds of different-sized containers, provide it in different formats, so people can enjoy the activity of reading wherever they want, with whatever time they have available to them.
Gravity Bear is really interested in finding new ways to provide fun, compelling, well-presented games that fill a wide variety of time-slices. We're focused right now on this short-slice segment that works very well on Social Networks because we think there's a fantastic opportunity there. But social networks will evolve, and so will we. You'll find Gravity Bear games wherever people have free time, and want to be entertained.
