In October 2020, a tiny team in Kajaani, Finland, decided to make a made-for-mobile version of Fall Guys. Just three weeks later, Kitka Games had launched its debut game in a small number of test markets.
Two years on, when Scopely bought Stumble Guys from Kitka in September 2022, the Finnish firm was running one of the biggest party games in the world with just eight staff.
And today, one could argue that it is Kitka and Scopely’s game that has snatched the party platformer crown from genre innovator Fall Guys. But how?
Kitka Games was founded in spring 2020 by CEO Olli Lahtinen, with CFO Teemu Määttä, backend dev Olli-Matti Jormakka and artists Juuso Pönkänen and Jaakko Kyllönen joining a few months later. Shortly after that, community manager Antti Nguyen became the sixth core member of the team.
Kitka had originally intended to make a racing game, but as Nguyen tells us, the idea for a Fall Guys-inspired game first came up in conversation with engine maker Photon. That company’s Quantum multiplayer tech would go on to underpin Stumble Guys’ rise to prominence.
“Now, whose idea it was, I’m not 100% sure…but I’m more inclined to say that it was pushed by them,” he tells us. “The first version of Stumble Guys that got launched…I think it was made within three weeks.”
By the end of October 2020, Stumble Guys was out in a small selection of markets and already picking up traction. “It was basically just soft launched immediately, because we had nothing to lose at that point,” says Nguyen.
But it gathered pace quickly, particularly among Indian and Indonesian players. Influencers in those countries had picked it up organically, and Nguyen jumped on the opportunity quickly. “It just basically exploded,” he says. “We never really paid anyone to make any videos – we just wanted to work with anyone who was willing to work with us.”
Nguyen invited any creator making Stumble Guys content to a private Discord channel, and hacked together some code to display those influencers’ usernames as red in the game.
He also gifted those influencers game currency, and their Gem giveaways helped the creators’ channels grow. It also gave Stumble Guys players incentive to engage with the community. “It was a really good loop between the influencers and the players, because the players who saw themselves in the videos would go and comment and follow the creators, and that would boost their content’s virality,” says Nguyen.
As Stumble Guys gathered pace on mobile, Mediatonic’s Fall Guys was still very successful – but it was not built to scale across platforms and run as a live service in the same way Stumble Guys was.
“I’m guessing that the way that Fall Guys is built, they just saw it as an impossible task to bring to mobile,” Nguyen tells us. “I read some article that said it wasn’t planned as a live service game anyways, so it was hard for them to port it.”
“I’m guessing that they also saw all of this as a booster for them too, because they weren’t able to come onto mobile anyway…so as Stumble Guys got more and more players, naturally some of those with consoles would go on to play Fall Guys.”
Where the Fall Guys team stumbled by not building out more live ops, Kitka kept on adding new features and events, leaning on its community further. “Everything started happening really, really fast during that time, players were coming in left and right – from everywhere,” says Nguyen. “Even during that time, I don’t think that we did any heavy UA, really, it was basically just influencers,” says Nguyen.
“The influencers gave me the specs on how they would want to build a tournament feature, and then I just did all the maps and all the rounds and everything,” he continues. “They would stream the tournament, and then their channel would be directly linked in our game, so people could go and watch it directly from Stumble Guys.”
Nguyen says one tournament built to host 40,000 players was filled in three seconds. “Our servers crashed all the time,” he says with a chuckle.
Kitka added two more staff as the game started to really rocket up the charts in late 2021 and early 2022 – at one point Nguyen says Kitka’s seven staff were running a game with 25m daily active users.
“We were on the brink of burning out,” he tells us, and with several suitors circling, the team decided to sell the game – but importantly, not the studio itself. Kitka had also approached other studios it thought were “a good match” in terms of running the game long-term.
“We had a spectrum of different bidders,” says Nguyen, though the number of offers it considered seriously was more like “a handful”.
With buyout talks ongoing, the game continued to gather pace, spiking in spring 2022 through a sudden jump in popularity in Brazil – again, more through Nguyen’s work with influencers than UA spend.
“We tested UA in Brazil during that time, but it made no difference,” he continues. “We tested it for I think a week or something and the numbers were the same, so we just toggled it off and let the organics do their thing.”
It then exploded into western markets, not only through the cumulative effect of the millions of players in the likes of India, Indonesia and Brazil, but also because Fall Guys had continued to move too slowly.
“In Western markets, people prefer PCs and consoles over mobile, and they have Fall Guys for that type of game,” says Nguyen. “But we were now picking up players everywhere…I don’t think Fall Guys did that many updates during that time because of how the game was built so I think it got quite stale.”
Kitka pushed harder into working with US influencers including BabyYoda, and streamers xQc and penguinz0 picked up the game organically. Mobile downloads peaked in the summer of 2022, and Stumble Guys topped the charts in the US and several major European markets.
By September 2022, Scopely’s acquisition of the game was confirmed. But Kitka didn’t want to sell up entirely, opting to continue on as an independent studio. “Our founders would say they didn’t feel like going to work for someone else,” says Nguyen.
Once the deal was done, the Kitka team spent a few months handing the game over to its new owners, before a very clear, clean break in January 2023: the studio’s core team went on holiday for six months. Nguyen, however, took a shorter break, and then worked with Supercell-owned HypeHype before returning to Kitka.
Under new owner Scopely, Stumble Guys has now been released across PC and console, has a line of merch in retail stores and has continued to run live events and collaborations with big names from Barbie to Mr Beast.
The Kitka team, meanwhile, is still comprised of just 11 staff. It is busily working on Battle Guys, the studio’s attempt to do for battle royale what it has done for party platforming on mobile. More on that here.
