Mediatonic

Mediatonic Games is a British independent games developer founded in September 2005^[2] as Mediatonic Limited. The company operates studios in London and Brighton, United Kingdom.^[3] The company was founded by two undergraduate students, David Bailey and Paul Croft during their final year of study at Brunel University.^[4] A group of industry veterans including Ian Livingstone, Kelly Sumner and Geoff Heath, invested in the company in 2010 and the company subsequently raised an undisclosed amount of Venture Capital funding from Frog Capital in January 2012.^[5][6] Its business model revolves around Games as a Service and digital distribution.^[7]

History

Mediatonic began as a digital communications agency whilst the Founders were at University; producing online marketing materials and websites for clients such as AstraZeneca.^[8] The company's first game was a viral flash game called Snowman Salvage released in the winter of 2005.^[9] The game provided a case study for Mediatonic to expand into Flash conversions for the Casual game Industry. Early games customers were businesses like PopCap, Big Fish Games and PlayFirst. In the early years, the company built casual titles in Flash such as Bejeweled and Diner Dash.^[10] Mediatonic expanded into creating original franchises with its partners around 2007. One of the first significant successes was Amateur Surgeon^[11] which, according to the Adult Swim website was played over 56 million times; making it their most played title of all time.^[12] The company expanded into smartphone development in 2008/2009 with the launch of its own title, Must.Eat.Birds.^[13][14] In 2009 the company began investing in original IPs more aggressively.^[15] According to its own website, the company span out its digital marketing efforts into a new business (now called Graphite Digital Ltd) so that it could focus on building games.

In 2010 the company raised funding from a group of Industry Veterans^[16] and began to focus on building original games (rather than converting other people's titles to different platforms).

Since 2011 the company has been working on larger titles including Foul Play for Xbox and PC,^[17][18] Amateur Hospital for Facebook (which received the company's first BAFTA Nomination^[19] and Amateur Surgeon 2 and 3,^[20][21] a free-to-play mobile game for iOS.

Around 2012 the company announced plans to expand with a second studio located in Brighton.^[22][23]

Partnerships & IP

Partnerships Model

Mediatonic publicly advocates a co-invested publishing model for game development. The Developer argues that the conventional "work for hire" model of the industry 'makes it impossible for a developer to react to a changing market, and incentivises short-term thinking'. Instead, Mediatonic says that it co-invests in game development with large Publishers and shares the royalties and running costs of the games it produces.^[24] The company's website lists many of the games industry's largest games Publishers as historical partners.

Square Enix Collaboration

Mediatonic revealed at the end of 2014 that it had been previously working with Square Enix Japan to develop an original mobile strategy game franchise^[25] called Heavenstrike Rivals.

The game was designed by Mediatonic in London to appeal to a global audience whilst also building on the style of popular franchises such as Final Fantasy.^[26] The game also includes character designs by Ryoma Ito ^[27] and music composed by Ryo Yamazaki who are known for their work on the Final Fantasy series.

Adult Swim Collaboration

Mediatonic is best known for creating the Amateur Surgeon series which was originally published online by Adult Swim in 2008.^[28] The franchise was later brought to the iPhone and subsequently as Amateur Surgeon 2,^[29] Amateur Surgeon Christmas Edition^[30] and Amateur Surgeon 3.

Amateur Surgeon Hospital, a simulation game on the Facebook networking site, was nominated for Best Online-Browser game at the British Academy Video Games Awards in 2013.^[31] Other notable collaborations between Adult Swim and Mediatonic include Robot Unicorn Attack:Evolution^[32] and Gigolo Assassin.^[33]

Expansion into Self-Published IP

Mediatonic releases its own internal games which are best known for their stories and sense of humour.^[34] The most notable of these is "Monsters (Probably) Stole my Princess" which was first released on List of PlayStation minis and achieved critical acclaim.^{[35][36][37][38]} Other titles include Must.Eat.Birds (2008)^[39] which was the company's first mobile title. Mediatonic also published Who's That Flying!? (2010)^[40] and 1000 Tiny Claws (2011) ^[41] amongst others.

Hatoful Boyfriend

In June 2014 Mediatonic stole headlines at the industry's annual event, E3^{[42] [43]} announcing it would work with Devolver to remake the cult Japanese Pigeon Dating Game Hatoful Boyfriend originally created by Hato Moa.

Foul Play

The company announced that it is working on its first title for Xbox Live Arcade and Steam (software) in August 2012. The title, known as Foul Play was released in September 2013.^[44]

Game Jams

Mediatonic holds regular Game Jam events in which small teams of developers compete to create the best possible game within a few hours. One outcome from these events was an application called "Inappropriate Llama Disaster" which was published for free on the iPhone and iPad.^[45][46]

Televised Competition

Mediatonic took part in a challenge set by The Gadget Show Television series in October 2009. The company worked with TV presenter Suzi Perry to develop an application that would compete against her co-presenter, Jason Bradbury, who sourced an app largely by himself. Both presenters submitted their applications at the same time to the App Store (iOS) and competed for the highest number of downloads.

Mediatonic created a game called "Biker Blast-off" for the competition which generated a shock result for the show; yielding 1.2million downloads during the competition period in contrast to the 4,074 downloads of Bradbury's "Social Beacon" application.^[47][48]

Development history^[49]

References

External links

• Mediatonic website
• Mediatonic YouTube channel