Paul Gouge has seen some remarkable success in the mobile game sector over the past couple of decades. After founding the email game company BattleMail with Alex Rigby in 1999, the pair set up the studio Rockpool Games in 2002, which created mobile versions of games such as Worms and was acquired by Eidos in 2007. Then Gouge and Rigby founded Playdemic in Manchester in 2010, which would go on to make its name with mobile and casual games such as Gourmet Ranch, Village Life and particularly the mega hit Golf Clash. Playdemic was acquired by Warner Bros in 2017 and then sold to Electronic Arts in 2021 for $1.4 billion, soon after which Gouge decided to leave. He’s now back with a new Manchester-based mobile game company, ForthStar, once again founded with Rigby. We catch up with him to ask how the mobile market has changed over his career, and what the future might hold in the face of market saturation and ever-fiercer competition.
You’ve been in mobile for over 20 years now. What are the big changes you’ve seen during that time?
We first got into mobile in 2001, and if you compare the market to then, it’s completely and utterly different in almost every regard. Back then, it was very experimental. The capacity and the processing of those devices was so poor that we were desperately trying to crowbar things into them. It was very much akin to the early days of videogames full stop, really. We actually saw a lot of the old 8bit IP make a transition to that early mobile generation, because the performance of the hardware was quite similar.
It felt like the bedroom coder came back for a little while during that period.
If I’m brutally honest, we didn’t really see very much of that. Our first big client was Siemens Mobile, and we had a business called BattleMail, which started out life as an online multiplayer game, and we ported that over. They’d figured out that Nokia were winning not because they had better technology, but because they sold on lifestyle: they were selling clip-on
