Meet Cambodia’s puzzle game hotshots

Sompom is an app development company based in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh. Its forte is puzzle and word games. Tech in Asia has reviewed some of their games, like Brainsquare and Origin, which appeared in 2013 and 2014 respectively.

In the Cambodian startup scene – which, despite increasing interest, must still be described as very early stage – Sompom is one of the dinosaurs. The company was established in late 2011. At that time, one other mobile app development studio existed: Osja – a company founded by Cambodians Ear Uy and Chivalry Yok. Osja released their most popular game to date, Asva the Monkey, in 2013.

Sompom’s two founders are French, but met each other in Phnom Penh where they were working at a software company. The pair came to realize that they wanted to create video games for mobile. Turning this ambition into reality, Sompom was born. Neither of them had ever created a game till this point.

Big in Japan

Starting from scratch was what landed them in the puzzle games niche to start with. “We had many ideas but we did not have much experience, so puzzle games seemed like the way to go,” says Jeremy Mum, one of the co-founders.

Their first game, Numbees and the world of Math, is an educational game that tries to make basic arithmetic fun by spicing it up with elements of a puzzle game. “The reception was good,” Mum recalls. Their first app landed them a featured spot on the iTunes store – in Japan. Numbees was developed for iOS only, so downloads in Cambodia were expectedly low, since costly iPhones are rare among Cambodians.

Sompom’s next game, Brainsquare, was developed for iOS and Android. They brought out a localized, Khmer-language version, but still, downloads in Cambodia remained low, while most of Brainsquare’s fans were in the US and Europe. The company’s most successful game to date is 1Word, a crossword puzzle game, with 100,000 downloads and up to 1,000 daily active users, according to Mum.

This year, the team plans to bring out its first arcade-style jump-and-run game, hoping that this will appeal more to the local audience.

Balancing game development and project work

Sompom does not rely on the success of its games alone to keep afloat. The company also takes on app development projects for clients. At this stage, Mum says, Sompom spends about 40 percent of its time on client services and 60 percent on its own games. The clients are mostly international, not from Cambodia.

With this strategy, Sompom has been able to grow into a team of fifteen, and plans to take this to twenty. However, Mum says, recruiting talent is not easy in Cambodia, so they rely on hiring fresh graduates with a general education in IT and then train them on the job. Sometimes they get lucky and find someone who is self-taught, or has previously worked in another software company.