How 'Draw Something' became a £113 million app in seven weeks

Things have always moved pretty fast in the mobile games business, but the explosive success story of Draw Something has got to have set some kind of record.
In just seven weeks, New York developer Omgpop went from a struggling firm on the brink of bankruptcy to an App Store powerhouse with a $180 million (£113 million) buyout offer from CityVille developer Zynga.
The game itself went from an invisible app that the press all but ignored, to the number one game in almost every major country, with a staggering 35 million downloads and a billion drawings a week.
The game, if you're the last person on Earth to have not tried it out, is classic Pictionary. A player is given a choice of words to draw -- a mashup of bog standard vocabulary (hammer, dandruff, rainbow) and pop culture icons (Bieber, Elvis, Vader) -- and doodles one for a friend.
The secret, by the way, is that different regions get different words. Britain gets "Adele", America gets "Tebowing" and Sweden gets "Ikea", for example.
The drawing is then stored on a server, and the other player gets a push notification on their iPhone, iPad or Android device. When they find time they can load up the game, guess the word, and then take their turn as artist.
It is to Pictionary what Words with Friends was to Scrabble. It takes a classic board game and makes it digital, social, viral and -- perhaps most importantly -- asynchronous, so two friends can play around their respective schedules.
Not coincidentally, Zynga previously purchased Words With Friends creator Newtoy, back in 2010. It handed over $53 million (£34 million) for the Texas-based developer and welcomed the Scrabble app into its caucus of games. The developer is now called Zynga with Friends.
The five-year-old Omgpop was a moderately successful firm before Draw Something blew up. It had made 34 other games -- stuff you've probably never heard of like Cupcake Corner and Putt Putt Penguin -- and had raised around $15 million in two funding rounds.
It brings to mind another company: Rovio, the unassuming Finnish outfit that had published 51 largely invisible games for Nokia handsets before hitting the big time with Angry Birds.
A New York Times report says the company "was on track to run out of money by May, and probably would have shut down by now," if it wasn't for Draw Something. It didn't look good when the press ignored Omgpop's latest game. "There was nothing written about us," Dan Porter, CEO, told Mashable. "[Reporters] weren't interested. I tried, but I couldn't even get their attention."
But despite the inauspicious launch on 1 February, it quickly caught on. On the day it launched, there were three drawings per second. A few weeks later and the game had 1,000 drawings every second. On the day Zynga made the buyout official, there were 3,000 drawings a second.
It reached 35 million downloads across iOS and Android, and at a time Draw Something was the number one word game in 84 countries according to Apple's figures. The app is free, but users can cough up for in-game items like extra colours and tools to help guess words.
Porter attributes the success to word of mouth, more than press or even advertising. Load up the game and the only way to play is to find a friend to play with. That means putting out a call for players over email, Facebook or Twitter. More players download the app, get their friends involved and the game spreads. Like an infectious disease.
When Rovio got big, it ditched publisher Chillingo to go alone. So why has Omgpop jumped into the arms of Zynga when it's already making hundreds of thousands of dollars a day?
"Our new partners at Zynga know how to innovate at scale, and they're pushing the limits of social with their mobile games," says Porter. "With the added resources we now have, and the deep gaming experience we can draw from, we can't wait to continue to surprise our users."
A big update is already planned, with the ability to tweet your best doodles and play 999-match games (the 99 limit was too low for some players, it seems). A Words with Friends-esque chat is on the horizon.
There's no big secret to Draw Something's meteoric success. Every element seems fine tuned to make it big in the mobile space: it's free with small payments, it's inherently social, it ties nicely into Facebook and Twitter, and the ties to pop culture are razor-sharp.
But the real question is: can this success streak last, like Angry Birds (whose space-themed spin-off just stole the iTunes top-spot from Draw Something), or will it fade out like so many one-shot apps before it?

Thank you : Source : www.wired.co.uk