We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Andrew Ow. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Andrew below.
Andrew, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I’m Andrew Ow, the founder of Haiku Games. Haiku Games makes puzzle adventure games. Our app, Adventure Escape Mysteries, has been enjoyed by tens of millions of players. In Adventure Escape Mysteries, players explore different stories. They can solve a murder mystery in On Thin Ice, wield powerful magic in Legend of the Sacred Stones, and escape a serial killer in Mirror Man.
The thing we’re most proud of is our games! In our unbiased opinion we make the best puzzle adventure games. We put a ton of work into making our games fun. We have a design principle called “satisfying challenge” which means that our puzzles are tough but solvable. We spend a lot of time tweaking the smallest pieces of our game – like making an animation half a second faster, or slightly brightening an item so it’s easier to see. And we are continuously pushing the boundaries, so our games improve over time.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
With hindsight I can see that starting Haiku Games was a good decision, but it was not obvious at the time.
I started Haiku Games after graduating from Stanford business school. I found starting a company wasn’t very glamorous. Haiku Games didn’t feel like a company at that time. It was more like myself in my pajamas in front of my computer week after week. At the same time, some of my classmates started working in finance and had salaries that were literally five times higher than what I’ve ever earned before.
There were two fortunate things. First, I had experience in the game industry. I previously worked on Facebook games, and I had the feeling that mobile games were going to be the next big thing.
Second, I discovered real life escape games. In 2013, I played “Real Escape Game” by Scrap, one of the first escape rooms to open in California. I had so much fun I quickly became obsessed with them (I’ve been to over a hundred escape rooms now). I played the escape games apps that were available at the time, and I didn’t think they were very good.
My knowledge of the game industry and my love of escape rooms caused me to come up with the idea of Adventure Escape, and that’s how Haiku Games started to succeed.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
My advice is to know when you can have fun and when you have to be serious. We make games, and we try to lean into that and have a fun place to work. We play games together, discuss the latest games we are playing, and get to know each other in sometimes silly ways. For example, we had a “minute to win-it” competition the last time we all got together which involved speed-sorting Skittles and tossing ping pong balls on peanut butter toast.
But there is a time to be serious – and that is making sure we have shared values. A big part of this comes into play when finding people to work with. It’s important for us to not just work with people who can do the job. We’re looking for people who love making games, respect our players, and want to work collaboratively with a team.
My goal is to run the company in a way that feels fair. I’ve been at some companies with politics or infighting, and we want to avoid that at Haiku. If someone is doing good work, we will give them a raise. It doesn’t matter if they ask for it. If someone is struggling, we let them know and help them out. This seems simple, but it isn’t the case at all companies.
This extends to the contractors we work with as well. We work with an art team called RetroStyle Games based in Ukraine. We were really worried about them when the war started, so we offered to send them a large pre-payment to help them out. They told us they didn’t need it. I mean, I suppose they could have lied to us and there’s no way we would have known. But that’s not the type of people they are.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
When I was starting Haiku, I knew I wanted to start a game development company. There was only one problem – I couldn’t do game development! I had experience designing games when I was at Electronic Arts, but I had never programmed.
I was in business school at this time, and I learned that there was an iOS programming class being taught in the undergrad campus. Even though the programming class conflicted with my business school classes, I listened to the lectures online and completed the homework as if I were a student. I even paid a friend who was a talented developer to review my homework. To motivate me, I had this crazy idea that if I didn’t turn anything in, I’d have to pay him even more! I never got any official credit for the class, but it really helped me kick-start Haiku Games!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.haikugames.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haikugamesco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/haikugames
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/haikugames