GDC 2011: Sarah Thomson on how going freemium has changed IUGO's dynamic

It's been developing mobile games for almost a decade, but making its first freemium game - the Capcom-published Lil' Pirates - has completed changed the direction of Canadian studio IUGO.

Entitled 'How IUGO rose above the noise and became a successful indie studio' at the GDC Smartphone Summit, director of business development, Sarah Thomson spoke about how the company's philosophy has remained the same, while its direction has changed.

With a mission statement, 'Delivering our passion through premium mobile experiences via proprietary tech', IUGO made its reputation as a work-for-hire house with the likes of EA Mobile and THQ Wireless.

However, prior to the Apple App Store being announced, it decided to switch from this Java/Symbian and Brew work to smartphones.

"That was a hard decision, especially for the first 6-8 months. Even though there was money to be made in the space, we shifted from feature phone game development to smartphones," Thomson said.

"You have to expect that the direction of your company will change over the years."

But with 15 self published smartphone games, and over five million downloads on iOS, another change happened in 2010, as IUGO decided to switch to making freemium games, with its Lil' Pirates release, which was developed in a concentrated period of four months.

IUGO choose to publish the game with Capcom; balancing the loss of control of the IP with the marketing budget Capcom could employ to launch the game in terms of cross promotion and buying installs.

"Lil' Pirates has completely changed the dynamic of the company," Thomson said.

"We believe a huge tsunami of social games is about to be released and we've been able to beat that rush."

Indeed, it will be focusing on freemium games for 2011 with its next social game - to be self-published - announced as Sunshine Cruise Lines, a cruise line management game.