Imagined Times: Interview on Harry the Fairy

In the past years, many business entrepreneurs have taken to developing games for mobile platforms, with IOS and Android being the most well-known of these. 


Imagined Times met CEO of Zaxis Games, Jacob Honore, for a quick talk about the difficulties his company has faced getting their game, Harry the Fairy, on the market: The pitfalls of having a publisher and signing off your rights to titles, target audiences, and some hard facts regarding the numbers involved.



By Jakob Fischer 

Having previously talked to Jacob, where he revealed his plans to eventually move the company away from their publisher, Chillingo, we asked him what his plans are for getting season II of Hairy the Fairy to the market:


“In regards to season II, we are actually in a position where we can’t do anything but publish it through Chillingo, since they own the rights to all future titles with this name. In other words, we can’t publish this, or future titles, with anyone else. So, we’re kind of locked down in that regard.”


Chillingo is taking a cut of 35 % from all games they publish for Zaxis. Adding the App Store’s cut (30 %) to that, Jacob previously revealed to us that they would need to triple their sales for the coming 
“Harry the Fairy season II”, in order to break even:


“Right now we are at 28.000 units sold. We need to sell 75.000, and would very much like to hit 100.000, since it’s such a nice number. “


Lastly, we got to ask him what changes, compared to Season I, they had planned to ensure this:
“One of the main critiques we’ve received is that our game is too easy. So, the difficulty of the levels we are bringing with season II will be higher. It will be more complicated. As it is right now, the audience that is actually playing the game, is quite a bit younger, 3-4 years younger, than we actually anticipated, compared to what we thought was going to be our primary target audience. And we actually want to try and hit our originally planned target, which is more like 8-15 year olds, whereas now the average player is 7-8 years old, which we think is too low.”