Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand June / July 2017: The Business Issue | Page 17

Business
Staff at work in
the Playlab office
His first port of call was Pattaya,
chosen because it was home to the
only soul he knew in Thailand. “I knew
one guy who had a gaming studio
in Pattaya. So I got a desk there and
slowly started doing project manage-
ment with this gaming studio.”
The next significant step on the
journey was meeting the person
who would later become his first
co-founder, another Dane in Thailand
named Thomas Kjeldgaard. They
started Pagemodo, a Facebook page
template builder, which grew quickly
and was acquired by a large U.S. com-
pany within 18 months.
Suddenly Lykkegaard had some
capital to invest in various startups.
When his friend in Pattaya lost an im-
portant client, he took over the gam-
ing studio that gave him his first work
in Asia. The name? Playlab.
LEARNING THE GAME
“I went from never dreaming about
making games to making games in
two days,” Lykkegaard says of his sud-
den entrance into the gaming indus-
try. Not knowing much about gam-
ing itself, he focused on the business
side of things: monetization, plat-
forms and overall design.
“I knew the team, and I trusted the
team,” he says. “that led us to become
the most successful gaming compa-
ny in town — after producing a few
crappy games first, that is.”
Under Lykkegaard’s and co-found-
er Thomas Andreasen’s leadership,
Playlab’s first game was a “technolo-
gy challenge.” The team learned how
to design games for mobile. Then
they made a second mobile game,
which had a different business mod-
el than the first — it was a freemium
app. Freemium applications are free
to use initially but require payment
for more advanced features.
While neither one of their first
gaming apps took off, the Playlab
team suspected they’d eventual-
ly strike gold with a freemium mo-
bile game. The only question was:
What would the third game need to
be about in order to see a return on
investment?
They looked to market trends
to guide the way.
At the time, Candy Crush
was a cash cow. Instead
of trying to come
up with some-
thing com-
pletely new,
they decid-
ed to dream
up another
game similar
to Candy Crush, running on mobile
with the monetization model they
believed in.
The team came up with a cute fruit
game concept that was born when
a touch of compassion turned into a
stroke of genius: Not wanting to up-
set the artists who’d worked so hard
on a never-launched Playlab game
called “Fruit Frenzy,” Lykkegaard sug-
gested they lift the graphics from the
dud game and apply them to their
new app inspired by Candy Crush.
What followed was Juice Cubes, a
game in which users match up ador-
able animated fruits to score points.
The app is free for download, but
users must pay for extra features
and game time. In this way, Juice
Cubes wets whistles for free but only
quenches thirst with payment.
The team soft-
launched Juice
Cubes in Australia
and New Zealand.
Once it was a hit in
New Zealand, game publishers
from around the world began seek-
ing distribution agreements with
Playlab.
They seemed to be making
good progress, finally. But hav-
ing one fun game under the belt
didn’t line pockets overnight:
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