HOW IT ALL STARTED
In 2003, 8elements was founded by Joerg Tente
with the objective to reduce the distribution of mobile entertainment content in Asia Pacific to 8 unique powerful alliance members in order to establish the leading network for the publishing of mobile games in Asia.
The elements in our name symbolize that the sum of is bigger than its parts; they stand for interdependency and interaction - one element as part of the whole. And the 8 serves as lucky number to ensure a prosperous development of the alliance.
8 different key markets/clusters are identified in the region, initially with Japan and South Korea - to be replaced by Vietnam and Myanmar later. The concept is still valid today - Asia Pacific consists of 8 big sales centers for mobile games in 2019!"
THEY WANT EVERYTHING DIGITAL FREE
The idea for BoBoiBoy: Adudu Attacks! was born after our success with Pubfun Duckshoot as premium game in our carrier channels. Flying under the flag of a major Southeast Asian brand
and TV hit series BoBoiBoy, we conceptualized the game as a premium tab shooter for BBB’s target audience of kids age 3 to 9 to be sold on Google Play and Apple’s store for 99 cents.
But once our Facebook and publicity campaigns took off, the first installs were flanked by mounting complaints about the PPD business model and 1 dollar price-point.
BoBoiBoy fans aggressively pushed our licensing partner Animonsta to make us give away the game for free. We carved in and converted it into a true freemium title with 5 levels free and 25 paid.
Fans were happy thereafter, our licensor was happy and we were happy with exploding installs and a peak at position #3 in overall games in Malaysia in November 2013.
Yes, Adudu Attacks! was beating COC and Where’s my Water for 2 weeks. Awesome!
NO SLOTS IN ISLAM
When Ejojo emerged as BoBoiBoy's new enemy, we made him the hero-villain in this split-screen game called Ejojo Puzzle Clash. It is a mash-up of a Card Collection - RPG and Slots title, a genre never seen before in mobile games. The presentation of the alpha version nevertheless revealed that major changes had to be performed given that BoBoiBoy is super successful in Malaysia and Indonesia, countries with a predominantly Muslim population and an aversion towards casinos and games of luck. In short, Animonsta killed our centerpiece and we had to replace it with a Tic-Tac-Toe mechanism which - luckily - works even better for the whole game.
THE FIRST MULTI-COLOUR DISPLAY
Back in the old days in 2003, we worked with iFone, a publisher from Manchester that licensed a good number of brands from Hasbro and Atari. Before we signed an agreement to distribute Monopoly and the Atari Classics in Asia Pacific we met at Cebit to test play the latest beta versions. Our whole team was super excited to play one of the first mobile games on one of the multi-colour screen handsets, an Ericsson 68. It was the time of Nokia, Siemens, and Motorola, of Snake and Asteroids in black and white, of monochrome displays and 64K file size limitations, etc. We came a long way to publish Unity 3D developments for high-end smartphones over 4G networks in 2018...
