Cat Quest developer scratches the right gaming itch

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Hello,

I used to only be a dog person, as I’d gotten scratched by a stray cat when I was younger and generally didn’t have much luck making friends with cats.

Everything changed when I went to university, where there were tons of cats that stayed around the campus. And near my dorm, there were two furballs I was particularly fond of. They were named Cola and Nachos.

Both have since passed – Cola from a dog attack and Nachos, which went missing, was assumed to have gone the same way too. But I learned everything about how to interact with cats from them and it’s helped me appreciate them a lot more.

I also came to realize that Singaporeans really love their cats, even stray ones. There was a student club called the Cat Management Network, which handled all the housing and feeding issues for stray cats at my university. And at home, there’s a network of local feeders who take turns to ensure that the community cats are taken care of.

This is something that Singapore-based game studio The Gentlebros seems to have realized and capitalized on. It developed a game called Cat Quest, which has got over 1.3 million paid downloads worldwide since launching in 2017. Today’s premium story dives deeper into this furtastic company.

Today we look at:

• A Singaporean game studio’s multimillion dollar game
• A former Flash Coffee executive’s new startup
• Other newsy highlights such as BetterPlace’s new solution and a US$25 million series B1 round for BandLab Technologies.

— Jonathan

Premium summary

Simply furnomenal

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Using cats to draw players in might seem like a simple no-brainer on the surface: Cute cats always work, no? However, there’s lots of considerations behind developing a game like Cat Quest, as we find out from the studio’s co-founder and CEO, Desmond Wong.

• The right pawlance: According to Wong, a successful game needs to balance having something fresh and including elements that people like and are used to. “You don’t want to create something alien and weird because then people can’t understand or appreciate it,” he explains.
• The long tail: Games make the most money within the first two years of their launch, with revenue gradually decreasing afterward. In order for The Gentlebros to have sustained earnings, Wong plans to release new titles before the previous one’s revenue starts dropping.
• A helping paw: The company raised US$3 million from Kepler Interactive, a UK-based game publisher and developer, in the third quarter of 2022. The firm will support Gentlebros’ published games as well as its future releases.

In a flash

Quick bytes