A Family Working From Home Made Nearly $100 Million in Revenue
The three-person team had about a month before they would need day jobs again.
David Senra · High School Dropout to Multi-Billionaire: The Relentless Drive of Rafael VivasThe office was a house, and the house was an office, recalled AppLovin executive Rafael Vivas, who ran the company's game publishing arm. Three people lived there, worked there, and may even have shared the same bed.
The team called itself Game5 Mobile. It was a husband, a wife and a little brother who had left stable jobs to bet on starting a game studio.
That bet produced Happy Glass, a simple mobile game that Vivas said brought in close to $100 million in revenue together with his company.
Vivas ran Lion Studios, the publishing business he had created to find promising outside developers and use AppLovin's vast advertising network to turn their games into hits.
Lion Studios grew from nothing to more than $250 million in revenue within two years. Its best partners were not in the United States, where labor was expensive and teams were often large and specialized, but in Europe and Asia, where small groups could test far more ideas, faster.
At the time Lion focused on so-called hypercasual games, simple titles picked for how marketable they were, using methods meant to predict what would be a hit.
Vivas said the games "didn't need the best of the best." Success came from getting the most reps possible.
Game5 fit that pattern, only more so. If the studio did not succeed in the next month, Vivas said, the three developers would need to find regular employment again.
For them, Vivas said, it was make or break. He said you cannot compete against people like that: "They will die before they fail."
Seeing their urgency drove him to work harder. He said he loved making underdogs successful, people nobody had believed in who finally had their big shot.
Questions people ask
What do you actually do in Happy Glass?
You draw a line to guide water into an empty glass without spilling it. Each puzzle takes only seconds, but later levels require clever shapes and timing. That quick, easy to learn design helped it spread to tens of millions of players.
What was Lion Studios?
Lion Studios was the game publishing business inside AppLovin, the mobile advertising company. It partnered with independent developers, tested their games for market appeal, and then used AppLovin's ad network to find players at scale. Revenue from the hits was shared between the developer and Lion.
Why did small overseas teams have an advantage?
They had lower costs, so they could afford to try many more game ideas. They also tended to work in very small teams where everyone did a little of everything. In hypercasual games, where success depends on quickly testing what attracts players, more attempts often beats bigger budgets.