Everyplay
The video sharing service with eyes on being mobile gaming’s YouTube
Founded 2008 Location Helsinki Employees 40 Key staff Jussi Laakkonen (CEO, founder) URL everyplay.com
The evolution of Helsinki company Applifier says much about how mobile and social gaming has changed. What started out as a game developer turned into a cross-promotional ad network for social games, then into a video advertising business, and finally into Everyplay, an ambitious video capture and sharing service and social network. All are united by their simplicity: those early banner ads required just five lines of HTML to implement, and while Everyplay’s blend of gameplay recording, facial capture, audio commentary and, soon, live streaming makes it a much more complex offering, developers can get it up and running in Unity in a couple of minutes. We speak to CEO Jussi Laakkonen about his plans to make Everyplay the YouTube of mobile games.
What’s the extent of what you’re tr ying to achieve with Everyplay?
The big question for mobile is: what’s the best way to find a game? The answer is: by asking a friend. Word of mouth is more important than ‘Featured’ slots. Four years ago I was having dinner with someone who was talking about this game about airplane traffic. I thought that sounded about as exciting as watching ice melt. Then he showed me Flight Control and I was like, “Holy crap”. And four years later, I’m still playing it. Imagine an ad having that much impact. At Everyplay our goal is to take the power of word of mouth and move it online, to make video sharing seamless and easy.
How many games use Everyplay?
It’s in 280 games on iOS; some really interesting developers are starting to use it. It’s in Bad Piggies, where the recording is on demand, but in most games it’s automatic. Rovio wanted to support 3GS, which is very low-end; it runs so fast that the game is not impacted, but if you make it automatic on 3GS it slows down too much. Another tap replays your video; you can trim it if you like and then share it to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email or our own social network. Everyplay has six million registered users, and registration is voluntary. And it’s fully crossplatform – if the game has iOS and Android versions, videos will be in the same place.
Can you explain how developers are using the technology in different ways?
While we provide a social interface to Everyplay, any developer can extend that to build whatever they want using the same API. A Finnish company called Grand Cru is making a game called Supernauts, and in it you have to level up to get the camera which opens up the ability to record, visit Everyplay and see your videos. When you view a player’s profile it uses our search API to pull replays from that player. You can embed Everyplay into your game, integrating leaderboards with high-score replays. We think people will come up with ideas for this that we haven’t thought of yet. We think of this as a service, or platform, that other people can extend.
Everyplay helps games to reach wider audiences; what does it do for players?
It’s about enabling players’ self-expression and giving them a medium to connect with other players. Feedback from other players and the ability to share your biggest wins and achievements is super-important to the most engaged players. Down the road, we hope we can also work with professional content creators, as you see with Twitch and YouTube, to allow them to reach more viewers and even help them earn revenues while doing that.