Earlier this week we chronicled the rise and fall of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a game that broke new ground in terms of fusing games with celebrity culture.
But former Glu boss Niccolo De Masi had plenty more to say about his time running the company before EA bought the firm for $2.1bn in 2021.
First, we talked through why those other celebrity games failed, including Taylor Swift collab The Swift Life. It was launched in late 2017 and shut down in early 2019. Nonetheless, De Masi came away from the project impressed with Swift’s business acumen.
“I knew she would be a billionaire when I started working with her in 2016,” he tells us. “I had no doubt that she would, because I was watching her business operation up close and how professionally managed she was.”
But the game didn’t work out, as De Masi explains: “Swift Life was mostly centred around a Taylor Swift social network that was relying on her 300m social followers porting over. However liquidity remained a challenge on the Swift Life social graph compared to a Twitter, Facebook etcetera…also it was not clear that fans cared as much about her day-to-day activities as her music.”
The Swift Life was among the last of Glu’s celebrity tie-in games, after it worked with Britney Spears, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj to try to replicate the success of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.
But there were plenty of other potential collaborations that didn’t emerge. Kardashian’s then-husband Kanye West was apparently among the most enthusiastic celebs of the era when it came to pitching Glu a mobile game.
“He tried to make a game two or three times, candidly,” De Masi tells us. “Kanye is arguably more passionate about video games than many in Kim’s family, honestly. He didn’t want to be in her game, though.”
“Kanye is a smarter guy than people think and he also knows when he’s out there. He was willing to propose game ideas to me. He sees himself as a creative renaissance man. Whether it’s clothing or gaming…he was convinced that he could make a successful game, and maybe he still will.”
There were other celebrity tie-ins that didn’t make it, too. “We built a Jason Statham shooter, I actually loved that shooter. And we almost did a Vin Diesel racing game. Sylvester Stallone sat in my office once and wanted to build an action game.”
“We almost booked a Selena Gomez game, we signed all of these people up. And we didn’t quite pull the trigger on them for a number of different reasons, temporal and development capacity issues.”
The title that worked best in Glu’s post KK: Hollywood era was, surprisingly, a restaurant game. “Gordon Ramsay was the closest because he’s also a TV guy and he works really hard,” says De Masi.
“But you know, I did a bunch of these games and none came close to Kim. It’s like Kim was first, Gordon was clear second place, and then there was a huge drop down.”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter who it was – Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Nicki Minaj…nobody else figured this out because frankly, they sort of outsourced their personal touch.”
“I would provide my personal cellphone number, so Kim could tell me when she was travelling and we would make sure we have a game update that hits when you go skiing and so on.”
“Kim understood that and we did that for years, but everybody else relied on their manager. It was very inefficient.”
Dealing with talent was tricky at times, says De Masi. Musicians turned up to a meetings six hours late, or were on the wrong coast when the meeting started.
“Nicki Minaj tried to liaise with me directly for a while,” says De Masi. “But she got upset over the concept of there being an antagonist rapper in her game and the working relationship deteriorated after that.”
Having lived through the mid 2010s frenzy for these tie-ins, De Masi says there’s a chance that the era of the celebrity mobile game will come back around again – but in a different form.
“When people like Marc Andreessen do a podcast in 2024 and they say things like the future of consumer media and brands is people, I’m like, yes, except I did that with Kim 12 years ago.”
“We were the first people that created an opportunity to follow a person and a story in a TV show, on social, in the game…we were also the only team to this day that managed to interweave this directly and in such a real time way. No-one else has pulled that off.”
So would De Masi do it all again? Could a ‘Glu 2.0’ emerge at some point? Maybe. “In the history of my career it never ceases to amaze me how often what’s old is new again,” he adds. “I’ve been doing this for a while, so I have no doubt that someone will figure out how to do something similar to what Kim and I have done.”
“Maybe I’ll do it again someday, you never know. I still have another 10 or 20 years, so maybe I’ll take another crack at it. Glu 2.0 has been on my mind in the last year. You never know there might be another Niccolo and Kim-style collaboration someday – it’s not impossible.”
