New UK studio Forthstar is targeting another Golf Clash-sized hit by building its debut game for the ‘underserved’ casual male player.
And as it did with Golf Clash, it will be deploying machine learning and AI models in its analytics, UA, focus testing and more, says cofounder Paul Gouge.
As we reported in January, the new studio from Playdemic founders Paul Gouge and Alex Rigby is based in Manchester, UK, and is already staffed by 14 ex-Golf Clash staffers. It is mostly self-funded, but has also secured a $10m investment from Griffin Game Partners.
Forthstar is deep in a “test-and-kill” process that Gouge says will bear its first fruits in 2025. The studio aims to serve casual male players in the same way it did with Golf Clash.
“We’re not settled on a prototype that we want to take to full production,” Gouge tells us. “So I think it will be at least a year away. It’s a similar process to Golf Clash and it’s interesting to note that when we were developing Golf Clash, that was against the backdrop of mobile being a challenging place, and not a good idea…”
“It’s about identifying an audience that we felt was somewhat underserved and we felt that the casual competitive male gamer wasn’t particularly well served.”
Gouge notes that there are plenty of female-focused casual games out there, particularly in match 3, and plenty of midcore titles that do well with males that have some gaming experience. But there’s relatively few for the “people who may not consider themselves as gamers and may not refer to themselves as gamers,” as Gouge puts it.
“They still want to have entertainment on their devices that’s short-session, that they can pick up and play with their friends, but that’s also meaningfully competitive that has a meaningful skill curve that gives it some longevity. That’s really where the start point is for this business.”
Forthstar’s debut will likely not be another sports game, though, as the team is thinking “more broadly”, says Gouge.
“With this audience you have to deliver something that’s surprising yet familiar. Golf Clash worked because everyone knows the rules of golf – it has to be something very accessible, but also surprising.”
Gouge acknowledges there’s “a lot of hot air” around AI right now, but his team has also hired a head of AI – also from Playdemic – who has set about integrating machine learning and AI tools into the game production process.
“A lot of the success story of Playdemic, which we didn’t really talk about, was in using machine learning in a number of areas,” Gouge continues. “We were quite early on this – before it was sexy to call it AI we called it machine learning and used it a lot in our user acquisition, the way we built our economies, predicted user behaviour…it was hugely successful and it was something that a lot of our competitors weren’t doing.”
Gouge won’t give away what exactly it is doing in this area for fear of tipping off those rivals, but it involves automating more manual processes and making larger-scale focus testing more efficient.
“What we’re trying to do is go one step further than than before,” he adds. “We’ve taken AI out of just user acquisition and analytics and put it above everything in how can we use these tools to really help accelerate things.”
