App Developer’s Corner: Darren Sillett, Co-Founder of Mighty Mighty Good Games

Today’s App Developer’s Corner features Darren Sillett, Co-Founder of Mighty Mighty Good Games. MMGG has been creating casual gaming apps since the iPhone first came out, and their free Sudoku app has consistently ranked in the top 100 in the AppStore. Here’s what Darren had to say about his experience creating a popular application, maintaining its popularity, and how he turned his love of gaming into a business:

Tell us a little about yourself.

I live in the beautiful countryside up in the Pacific Northwest with my wife Samantha. When we’re not making iPhone games we enjoy hanging out with our grown-up children and the numerous animals we’ve acquired or adopted over the years.

I often dabbled with mobile devices over the years. There is something compelling about the closed system and tightly integrated combination of software and hardware; the iPhone was just the most recent in a lengthy line of toys. I’ve also had a long time love of gaming. I am a child of the original home console generation and have owned pretty much every console since. I still enjoy playing a lot of the older games. The game design was generally a lot tighter when they couldn’t rely on graphics and flash to get them by. Favorite game of all time: Legend of Zelda on the Super Nintendo.

I have been programming for over twenty years, including long stretches at Microsoft and Amazon.com. Samantha also has a strong technical background, including many years at Microsoft, but her main contribution is on the creative side giving the games a clean and polished look. Neither of us had used a Mac much in the past – in fact, we had to buy one to write Sudoku!

Actually, it was because of Samantha’s obsessive playing of a web version of Sudoku on her iPhone. She was often frustrated by the repetition of the games and lack of features and knew we could do better. So, as an exercise in learning how to code for the iPhone, I prototyped a simple Sudoku version for her. This started a long list of “honey, it would be nice if…”s and “sweetheart, could you add this little feature, please”s which quickly built into a well rounded and solid game.

We created Mighty Mighty Good Games as a husband and wife team, building on our complementary set of skills and abilities.  We decided to focus on a specific area, casual games, leveraging our years of experience in shipping high quality software. Our initial aim was to create a paid and free version of the traditional Sudoku game and then create some variants before moving on to other categories of casual games.

Really, the early launch of our free version of Sudoku was a key event for us. It was in the App Store only about a week after the store launched and gained us a lot of momentum; it’s been in the top 100 free apps in the US over a year now and downloaded more than 5 million times. The free version drives adoption of our paid version and the other variants that we created.

Pinch helped immensely in the early days when there was zero reporting available from Apple. We were able to track our downloads, unique users and the amount of time people were spending with the game. Since then, we have used the Pinch metrics system to mine our data for player behavior e.g. how often people visited the options screen and what they selected. This has helped us evolve the games.

Listen to your users. Don’t be swayed by every feature request that you get but do look for trends and act on them.

Besides facilitating business transactions, Darren’s success creating and distributing recreational apps shows how the iPhone can also be a great gaming medium. Visit Mighty Mighty Good Games for more information about the company and the gaming apps they offer. And if you’d also like to gain more insight into your user behavior, register for an account at Pinch Media and let us know if you have any questions getting started.

- Katherine Pan