Kixeye
Kixeye Logo
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| Private | |
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | July 2007 |
| Founder | Paul Preece David Scott Will Harbin |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, United States |
| Products | Backyard Monsters, War Commander, Battle Pirates, Desktop Defender, Vega Conflict, Tome |
| Website | www |
Kixeye (stylized as KIXEYE, formerly known as Casual Collective) is a San Francisco, California-based developer of online strategy and combat games with over 5 million monthly active users. It creates games for competitive gamers and its titles Backyard Monsters, Battle Pirates, and War Commander prominently feature "explosions and gore and mayhem". Its real-time strategy game Backyard Monsters has had over 20 million installations. Kixeye expected to generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2012.
Developers David Scott and Paul Preece began Kixeye as Casual Collective, where they developed 13 Flash games. The developers wanted to "make games that we grew up playing and that we love playing."
In mid-2009 when searching for new venues for their strategy games, Scott and Preece decided to take their Flash knowledge and move it to Facebook. After developing Minions on Ice and TSG: Missions, Casual Collective hired Will Harbin, the co-founder of Affinity Labs, as CEO and moved its headquarters to San Francisco, where they developed Desktop Defender, a Tower Defense game for Facebook. After its release in December 2009, the game reached 675,000 monthly active users and produced more revenue in one day than their previous games made in one month.
Development of Backyard Monsters started in 2009 but it wasn't released until January 2010 as "Desktop Creatures" before being renamed by fan vote to "Backyard Monsters" seeing as the game had nothing to do with desktops in its original release on Facebook. Backyard Monsters is a real-time strategy game on Facebook with, unlike other Facebook games, "destruction and gore and mayhem." Players begin by building a yard for their monsters, designed so that essential buildings are protected by defensive towers. If the player's yard is designed correctly, the defenses will stop invading monsters who try to damage the buildings and loot resources.
Backyard Monsters : Unleashed is a port to iOS released in October 2013.
Executive Producer David Scott said he designed the game to "be able to play a [real-time strategy] game in short sessions. I like to think that we're providing some of that RTS magic to people who used to play them quite frequently, but now have a job or maybe a family, and just don't have the time." Kixeye has been updating Backyard Monsters every week for two years. Currently, 20 million people have installed the game. An expansion for Backyard Monsters titled Inferno was released in January 2012 and in November 2012 the new world map was released. In addition to this, Backyard Monsters also has outposts in the new world map when the new world map update came. On February 18, 2013, the Kongregate version of Backyard Monsters was shut down. Backyard Monsters is no longer supported and player numbers have fallen significantly since its groundbreaking inception.
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Wikipedia