Games as a Service
Halfbrick
Built Halfbrick's product function and turned Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and the whole catalog into live services. The flagship passed a billion downloads.
Chief Product Officer at Halfbrick, after first leading R&D as Chief Invention Officer.
Halfbrick made cultural objects, Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, but it was shaped like a premium studio: ship a title, sell it, move on, and let the back catalog quietly die.
I built the product function and rebuilt the studio around live services: the roles, the instrumentation, the operating model. Releases moved from yearly to a biweekly themed cadence, update pipelines made that cadence sustainable, and the catalog reached new platforms like Android TV and Amazon Fire TV. A game stopped being a launch and became a service with constant reasons to return.
It worked across the catalog. Fruit Ninja ran at roughly 60 million monthly players and crossed a billion downloads. The sharpest single proof was Age of Zombies: a four-year-old title most studios would have sunset, pushed back into the top 20 of the U.S. App Store, paid and free. The playbook was repeatable, and it became a GDC talk.
I also built Halfbrick Academy, which put students inside real production on globally shipped games. A studio that wants to keep inventing has to keep making inventors.
R&D taught me how to find what is new. Product taught me how to make it last. A portfolio needs both.
Gallery
- The GDC talk: how a four-year-old game went back into the U.S. top 20, and the repeatable playbook behind it.
- Age of Zombies, the proof case. Four years old, ready for sunset, treated as a product worth investing in instead.
- Jetpack Joyride run as a live service: a cultural object kept earning instead of fading.
- The most recognizable slice on mobile. Simple to play, operated like infrastructure.
- Themed events on a biweekly cadence: every update a reason to return, and a reason to be featured again.
- In the Fruit Ninja credits.
- And in Jetpack Joyride's. Both flagships, run as live services.