Have you ever played a game called Farmville, Mafia Wars, or at least been spammed by your Facebook friends, desperate for you to help out at their “farm” or “diner”? If you have, then you have experienced a more recent genre of gaming called “Social Games.”
As all of us likely know, with the advent of Facebook, it has never been easier to keep up with your friends at more hours of the day. Not only can you keep up with your friends, but you can now also play games with them which are embedded into Facebook or other social platforms.
A more recent foray into the social gaming market is a game called “Kingdoms at War” created by the young company, A Thinking Ape. Two of the three founders are actually from Waterloo, Wilkins Chung who graduated from Computer Engineering in 2005 and Eric Diep who studied in the Math faculty before dropping out and moving to California to start a company.
At a recent information session held by A Thinking Ape at the University of Waterloo, Diep explained entrepreneur culture in Silicon Valley of the last few years to a group of interested Engineering and CS students. Back in 2007 and 2008, young coders would rent out a cheap apartment with a few friends and spend their time coding up a project and, once completed, release it on a platform and try to gather as many users as possible. After producing a large user base, these groups of entrepreneurs would then present their idea to investors in order to get funding for their project. After securing funding, the money would then be used to hire more of their friends and build a company around their product.
That’s kind of how A Thinking Ape got started. First, Diep’s partners were developing chat technology which they deem as “IRC 2.0” in the form of a product called “chatterous” which had funding from Angel Investors. At the same time, Diep was developing games and they decided to experiment with combining the chat technology with the social game. After two months of developing time, the game was launched on the iPhone in September 2009. It took the group of guys a couple months before realizing their product was on to something and had the potential to be very big.
Around November of 2009, a decision was made to move the company to Vancouver, as the city is seen as a hotbed of game development. One year after launching their game, A Thinking Ape now has 1 million active users and that number is constantly growing with the company now being funded off revenue from the game. Not only is their game growing in numbers, but also is their company. The company is actively hiring out of Waterloo to build up their ranks of game developers. Because the company is a start-up, Diep told the crowd that the earlier people join the company, the bigger the piece of the company they will receive.
If you’re a motivated individual and want to get into the game developing market, be sure to check out and apply to A Thinking Ape. The company is set to release three more games in the near future which are likely to be as successful as Kingdoms at War, if not more so. The young founders are very confident A Thinking Ape will be one of the largest tech companies in Canada in a short few years, so if this is something you’re really interested in, now is the best time to get involved!
Leave a Reply