How a husband and wife built a 13-staff game studio with 4 titles and no outside funding

Happy Labs is one of Singapore’s more prolific independent game studios, having released a total of four games in just two years of operation. It’s also one of its more successful ones, even if you haven’t heard much about it.

Happy Labs founder Jeffrey Chee started up the company with his wife, Kayee. The duo developed their first game, a toy crafting adventure aptly named Toy Craft before they moved on to work on Hotel Story. Hotel Story, a management game where players run their own hotels, would prove to be their big break.

The game went viral thanks to two key elements: timing and luck. At its release in early 2013, the mobile game market was flooded with card games. There were fewer simulation games getting released, and a lot of companies had moved into the more lucrative mobile card game genre as well. Chee says he was lucky to have developed a simulation game at a point in time where there wasn’t much competition on the market.

Hotel Story gave the husband-and-wife team the much needed financial boost it needed to expand the Happy Labs team. Chee used to work in Koei Tecmo in Singapore, and then in Nubee after that. He recruited his ex-colleagues from both studios, and the now 13-man-strong team set out to build Happy Mall Story.

Happy Mall Story turned out to be an even bigger break. Happy Mall Story players migrated from Hotel Story – it was easy to reach out to the large user base the latter had built – and never left.

Both Hotel Story and Happy Mall Story have combined accumulated downloads of over 10 million just on official app stores. The mall management game still holds the record of having the company’s most daily active users – more than 100,000 – even more than a year after launch. The World Cup rolled around after Happy Mall Story, so the Happy Labs team took advantage of the festivities to launch a simple 3D running game called Football Rush.

Happy Labs has been working on a new project since then, with a mini game already launched as a teaser. Another mini game comes out this week, with the actual game, Happy Pet Story, expected to launch this year.

Happy games

Happy Mall Story and Hotel Story are still the studio’s most popular games. They also make the most money of all of Happy Labs’ games, and mainly comes from full-screen pop-up advertisements in the game.

The Happy Labs team says while all its games are localized in Japanese, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese on top of its standard English language, Hotel Story saw a better reception in the US, whereas Happy Mall Story is more popular within Asia. The latter game also received Indonesian and Thai localizations, while Hotel Story got Korean, Russian, German, and Spanish support.

One key thing to note about Happy Labs games is that they are mostly free-to-play, with a notable lack of a paywall. While you can fork over real money to speed up your game or to buy special items, there’s no gachapon feature in sight. Gachapon monetization involves paying virtual or premium currency for a shot at getting a rare item.

Chee’s take on gachapon monetization is simple: if you have children, you wouldn’t want them to spend money on a game that might simply close down because it’s not profitable, leaving you with nothing to show for it.