Gamasutra talks with American about the social media formats
on December 30th, 2011 at 10:00 am
As always, Gamasutra asks the awesome questions. They recently interviewed American McGee to get the scoop on how BigHead BASH came to be.
“Even though Amercian McGee’s Spicy Horse just wrapped up development on Alice: Madness Returns for EA, don’t expect to see another big-budget game from the Shanghai-based studio. The team has since changed focus to make good on its plans to explore alternative business models, starting with a new Facebook title dubbed BigHead Bash.
“The game is Spicy Horse’s first foray onto social networks, and has players take control of virtual figurines to duke it out in a side-scrolling online deathmatch. Collecting figures will play a huge role in the game, allowing players to earn bonuses for filling out their collection with sets of both original and licensed toys. Taking the theme one step further, Spicy Horse even has plans to sell physical figures tied to the game via a specialized 3D printing service.
“With its licenses and merchandising hooks in place, it might appear that the toy-based brawler was tailor made for microtranscations and the free-to-play model. In a recent interview with Gamasutra, however, American McGee explained that all of these systems fell into place only recently, and Spicy Horse didn’t even think about monetization until BigHead Bash was well underway…”
You can read the rest of the article here.
