Jam City seeks another hit with more ‘Family Guy,’ plans for IPO
Mobile game company successfully marries Hollywood with tech
CULVER CITY, CALIF. You won’t see Jam City’s mobile games in the top 10, top 20 or even top 30 of app download charts. But it’s ringing up sales, carving out a niche that encouraged it to announce its ninth title Thursday.
The game publisher made $330 million in sales last year, a number that will grow to between $425 million and $450 million this year, according to co-founder Chris DeWolfe.
Those annual sales already top Glu Mobile, maker of popular games featuring singer Katy Perry and the Kardashian sisters, which reported $200 million in 2016 sales. But it has a long way to catch up to Farmville publisher Zynga, which posted $741 million in revenue in 2016 even as it struggled to reinvent itself.
“Games have changed: The engagement is incredible, the revenues are incredible,” says DeWolfe, best known as the cofounder of the first major social network, MySpace, which for a time ruled the Internet until floundering when Facebook surpassed and crushed it.
Jam City, the company DeWolfe co-founded in 2010, is best known for games such as Panda
Pop (currently No. 36 on the iTunes app chart, game category)
and Cookie Jam (No. 39) and working with entertainment firms to adapt their properties into games. Jam City has a hit game based on 21st Century Fox’s
The Family Guy and will release an ambitious game update of Fox’s Futurama, the animated cartoon last seen in 2011, later in the spring.
Thursday, it announced its latest: Family Guy: Another Freakin’
Mobile Game, which will marry gaming technology with Hollywood pizzazz — the show’s writers and actors work with Jam City on the game. The first Family
Guy game was downloaded more than 50 million times.
Games are free. Jam City makes money when players opt for in-app purchases, anywhere from $1 to $50. For the extras, players get extra chances to complete games and bonus pieces.
Jam City is looking to go public later this year or in early 2018, DeWolfe says.
DeWolfe has kept his connection with 21st Century Fox via the
Family Guy and Futurama games. MySpace was sold to Fox in 2005 for $580 million, but once Facebook stole people’s hearts, My Space lost its mojo, and Fox sold it for $35 million in 2011. My Space is currently owned by Time Inc. but isn’t active with new content. (At its peak, in 2008, My Space was grossing $700 million, or double what DeWolfe saw in 2016 with Jam City.)
Looking back, DeWolfe says the error at MySpace was trying to monetize too early, before building a larger base, which is how many Silicon Valley tech firms usually do it.
“We should have focused more on connecting with your friends,” he says. “We bit off a little more than what we could chew.”
After Fox replaced him with a new CEO in 2009, DeWolfe thought about what he wanted to do next. A trip to Japan, where many folks accessed MySpace on mobile devices, coupled with how then-hot mobile game company Zynga was making $150,000 a day on his social network, brought him to mobile games. With mobile, he has a population of 3 billion people who all “have a console in their pocket,” he says.
The idea was to do mass market games for men and women, similar to King ’s Candy Crush Sa
ga and Rovio’s Angry Birds. Jam’s most popular game, Cookie Jam, has grossed more than $450 million in revenue, DeWolfe says, and has remained on the charts for years. But how does he convince investors that fickle gamers won’t move on to other games and leave Jam City in the dust?
Focus on user requests, making acquisitions and re-investing in current games, and looking to expansion to virtual and augmented reality, he says.