Announcing Dragon Army 2.0
What a journey this has been so far. A little over a year ago Ryan Tuttle, David Cummings, and I started Dragon Army. The goal: make great mobile games. We started it the Atlanta Tech Village – in my opinion the best place in Atlanta to create a startup. We launched two games, Robots Love Ice Cream and Paper Trail. And we’ve already had some great success, with Robots being in the top 1% of all games downloaded in 2014 and winning an AIMA award for the Arby’s campaign we ran within Robots. So far, so good :)
Over the last year I’ve learned a great deal. About myself, how to lead a creative group (give them freedom!), and about the gaming industry overall. But one thing that struck me from the very beginning was that the principles of building successful games – the science of building engaging and addictive games – is THE missing ingredient in digital marketing. Every CMO and agency leader I know struggles with the same thing: getting people to engage more with the digital properties they’ve created. Building stronger bonds with customers and keeping them coming back is getting harder and harder.
That thinking led me to have many discussions with the most knowledgeable mobile leader I know, Danny Davis. Danny was one of the original partners in my first company, Spunlogic, and one of my best friends since we were 12-years old. He started Proving Ground over four years ago and has built it into one of the leading mobile agencies in the Southeast. After several months of talking, we hatched a plan to bring our two companies together.
I’m excited to announce that Dragon Army has acquired Proving Ground, bringing the two companies together to form a new type of mobile company!
The new Dragon Army is one part mobile gaming studio, one part mobile experience agency. One team makes games for consumers while the other is building mobile experiences for businesses. Our unique differentiation is that we will apply successful game theory and game psychology to make the mobile experiences we build for companies more engaging and achieve better results. You can check the Atlanta Business Chronicle article from last Friday for more details on the acquisition.
As one of my mentors always says, onward and upward!
[…] Army co-founder Jeff Hilimire wrote in his blog that bringing the two studios together would result in the formation of a new kind of gaming […]
Very exciting, Jeff. Wishing you the best of luck!
[…] Hilimire, Dragon Army CEO, recently had this to say on his personal blog about the combined forces, “The new Dragon Army is one part mobile gaming studio, one part mobile […]
[…] at Dragon Army are going great, and I couldn’t be happier with our progress after the Proving Ground acquisition late last year. We should have some awesome announcements to make soon about new projects […]
[…] office ever again. And when we moved into our new space at Dragon Army late last year as a part of our reboot, I decided I didn’t want to have my own desk. Sure, I wanted a desk I could sit at when […]