Dubai-Based Gaming Studio Piranha Byte Launches Its Brainchild: Peek!
Piranha Byte, a game
development studio based in Dubai, just released its first title
Peek!, inspired by the most successful photo
sharing mobile applications such as Draw Something, Hangman, and
Instagram.
Piranha Byte is a self-funded startup, launched around a year ago,
and co-founded by a group of five young enthusiastic game lovers
from different backgrounds and countries (Lebanon, Egypt, Libya,
Morocco, India, and London) who are all based in Dubai.
"We are here to learn from the best", says Waleed Kharma one of the
co-founders, explaining how the team was inspired by other
successful games adding a new twist in execution and design,
especially by using the Game Minion platform to develop Peek!. The team
will be releasing another word-play game next month.
Peek! is a multiplayer turn-based game where the gamer challenges
his friends (or strangers) to guess a secret word based on a photo
that he shares with them. The photo is initially hidden by
tiles with one tile removed to allow them to peek at the photo. The
players take turns and can peek by revealing tiles with each turn.
Free apps today are considered an
easy way to raise awareness and become known on the market and the
Piranha Byte team has embraced the freemium model, by putting the
game on the Apple store for free, monetizing through the in-app
purchases model. The model encourages players to spend while in the
game to buy consumables and further levels. For example if a player
is struggling to guess a word he can use "peeks" from his
account to gradually reveal a tile of his choice or use coins to
buy more peeks. This model was also adopted by Lebanese game
developers GameCooks and in the extremely popular "Words
With Friends" game.
Another way that the Piranha Byte team is monetizing is through
advertisements that appear in the app, and disappear once the
player spends money.
During his discussion with Wamda, Kharma mentioned the game is
"targeting casual gamers, mainly females". It is true that the look
and feel of the app appears a little feminine, with a pink and
purple motif, but can a regular game be categorized "for females"
without bearing any gender-based connotation?
The game is available to download for free in the iTunes store
here and will be coming soon to Google Play on
Android.
You can also check Piranha Byte's Facebook
Fanpage, and the Peek! Facebook
Fanpage, or follow Piranha Byte on Twitter @Piranha_Byte.