'SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off' Serves Up Fun Under the Sea as it Launches on Mobile Platforms Worldwide

SPONGEBOB: KRUSTY COOK-OFF SERVES UP FUN UNDER THE SEA AS IT LAUNCHES ON MOBILE PLATFORMS WORLDWIDE TODAY

The Highly Anticipated Game Co-Developed By Tilting Point, Cooking Game Veteran Nukebox Studios, and Renowned Entertainment Brand, Nickelodeon, is Now Available

NEW YORK -- May 12, 2020 -- SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, the highly anticipated mobile game that puts fans behind the Krusty Krab grill to serve the characters of the beloved animated series, is now available on mobile devices. Co-developed by Tilting Point and Nukebox Studios in partnership with Nickelodeon, SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off gives players the chance to become the best fry cook under the sea by downloading the game for free on iOS and Android. A new gameplay trailer of SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off in action can be viewed below:


In SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, players will experience fun and fast-paced cooking gameplay as they interact with Mr. Krabs, Patrick, Squidward, Sandy and many other familiar faces. Fans can visit their favorite SpongeBob landmarks like the Krusty Krab and Sandy's Treedome; design their own versions of Bikini Bottom restaurants; and cook up grub across hundreds of levels on their journey to be the best fry cook under the sea!

“The deep co-development experience with Tilting Point and the close partnership with Nickelodeon allowed us to see this awesome SpongeBob game come to life and bring a new spin to the franchise we love so much,” said Amit Hardi, CEO at Nukebox Studios. “This is our second title with Tilting Point and really shows how far we have come together as partners and what we can accomplish as a team.”

SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off marks the second partnership between Nukebox Studios and Tilting Point. The companies previously joined forces to launch the hit cooking and food truck management game, Food Truck Chef, which has been downloaded over 25 million times, became the No.1 Android Casual Game in 40 countries (including the U.S.) and made it to the Top 100 Grossing Charts in more than 100 countries on the App Store and Google Play. Prior to its launch, SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off has already generated tremendous excitement as more than 15 million fans pre-registered to play the game.

"We couldn’t be more thrilled about launching this unique take on a beloved franchise that is the result of our strong collaboration with Nukebox Studios and Nickelodeon,” said Samir El-Agili, President of Tilting Point. “This is an excellent example of the type of projects we aim to create with our progressive publishing model. After our successful partnership with Nukebox Studios scaling Food Truck Chef, we were both able to benefit from co-developing SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off together from the ground up, and we are very proud of the results.”

For all the latest information on SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, visit https://spongebobkrustycookoff.com/.

SpongeBob SquarePants, which was recently greenlit for a 13th season, has reigned as the number-one kids’ animated series on TV for the last 17 years, while generating a universe of beloved characters, pop culture catchphrases and memes, theatrical releases, consumer products, a Tony award-winning Broadway musical which is now touring North America and a global fan base. SpongeBob SquarePants is seen in more than 208 countries and territories, translated in 55+ languages, and averages more than 100 million total viewers every quarter. SpongeBob SquarePants is created by Stephen Hillenburg and produced by Nickelodeon in Burbank, Calif.

Nickelodeon's is currently in the midst of the network's "Best Year Ever", a year-long global celebration of one of the most iconic TV series and characters ever created. The “Best Year Ever” launched with the premiere of “SpongeBob’s Big Birthday Blowout,” an original mixed live-action and animated special earlier this summer, and leads up to the Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies theatrical, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, coming summer 2020.

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About Tilting Point

Tilting Point is a new-generation games partner that applies a unique progressive model to free-to-play games publishing. Tilting Point takes live games with the highest potential and scales them up to top rankings by leveraging its $132 million user acquisition fund, market leading UA/LTV technology and expert teams who understand the market and the players exceptionally well. Once a game scales, the pathway to bigger projects, such as co-development, is open. Tilting Point has scaled over 65 games across the US, Europe and Asia and is currently scaling 26 games and partnering on 4 co-development projects. www.tiltingpoint.com

About Nukebox Studios

Creating awesome since 2009, Nukebox Studios is a full stack mobile game development studio based out of Bengaluru, India. With their complete and well-rounded production team, Nukebox Studios is working on developing and publishing innovative and original IPs for the global audience. Nukebox uses a data-driven approach with the focus on building high-quality games. It counts a combined experience of 180+ man-years across the team and an undying passion for gaming. At Nukebox, players are their first, second and third priority.

Learn more at www.nukeboxstudios.com

Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon, now in its 41st year, is the number-one entertainment brand for kids. It has built a diverse, global business by putting kids first in everything it does. The brand includes television programming and production in the United States and around the world, plus consumer products, digital, location based experiences, publishing and feature films. For more information or artwork, visit http://www.nickpress.com. Nickelodeon and all related titles, characters and logos are trademarks of ViacomCBS Inc. (Nasdaq: VIACA, VIAC).

From the official Tilting Point blog:

A NEW GAME, A NEW BRAND, AND A NEW CHAPTER FOR TILTING POINT

It’s an exciting day for the team at Tilting Point, and we’re proud to share two major milestones with you: the worldwide launch of SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off for mobile devices, and the debut of Tilting Point’s new global brand identity, designed to reflect our continued commitment to pioneering a new progressive publishing model for free-to-play games.

The gaming industry has changed a lot since Tilting Point was founded in 2012. And today’s news is a great example of the ways that we’ve consistently stayed ahead of the curve with mobile and free-to-play games, not just moving with the trends, but helping to lead the way.

COOKING UP FUN IN BIKINI BOTTOM

Today marks the worldwide launch of SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off for mobile devices. This launch is a testament to months of hard work and incredible collaboration between Tilting Point, our co-development partners at Nukebox Games, and the legendary team at Nickelodeon.

The game delivers the big laughs and rich IP that SpongeBob fans expect, with best-in-class cooking game mechanics that have made Nukebox one of the premiere developers on mobile. Combine that with the publishing, live game operations expertise and technology that Tilting Point brings to the table, and we’re confident SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off will bring years of entertainment to players around the world.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, you can grab it for free here. We think you’ll love it!

A new look for a new kind of publisher

Today also marks the debut of a new global brand identity for Tilting Point. You’ll see the new logo, color palette, and updated look and feel across Tilting Point’s games and here on our website, starting today. We think this new aesthetic better reflects our dynamic take on progressive publishing that redefines the relationship between developers, publishers, and IP holders.

We’re ready to POWER UP your game, and TEAM UP with your studio

The game industry moves incredibly fast, and it’s important for modern publishers and developers to stay ahead of the game if they want to be successful. That’s where Tilting Point’s approach to progressive publishing comes in. We’re here to help developers of all shapes and sizes raise their game, no matter what that means to an individual team at the time.

We look at publishing as a journey. It may start with us helping a team POWER UP their existing game with our live publishing offering—whether that’s optimizing for app stores, using our proprietary tools for automating production of ad creative, or giving them access to AI tools for maximizing UA spends. Many teams come to us with a great game that just needs a little extra publishing support to really catch fire. We can scale to whatever a developer needs, and we’re always in a position to step on the gas when the moment is right.

Once we build a relationship with a studio, there’s often an opportunity to TEAM UP and create a deeper co-development relationship. This is where the magic of progressive publishing really starts to shine through. Once we’ve built trust with a team, and we have a mutual understanding of each other’s capabilities, we’re able to unlock some incredible opportunities.

SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off is a great example of this. After working with the Nukebox team to grow their game Food Truck Chef, we knew they could bring their cooking game expertise to the SpongeBob universe. We helped connect the dots between Nickelodeon, Nukebox, and Tilting Point, and we’re excited to reveal the results to the world today.

We’ve had similar success with the teams at Hunted Cow, who are our co-development partners on Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest, and the team at Metagame Studios, who are working on Zombieland.

The results have been tremendous. Revenue has grown more than 800 percent between 2017 and 2019, and our team has grown as well. Tilting Point has expanded from six employees in 2012, to 135 today across offices in New York City, Barcelona, Boston, Kiev, and Seoul. We also have an expanded co-development network of more than 100 team members working on our games at Nukebox Games, Hunted Cow, Metagame Studios, and Big Wolf Games, bringing our total team to more than 250 developers, marketers, data scientists, and designers.

Onward!

It’s been a thrilling few years at Tilting Point and we’re just getting started. While it’s nice to take a look back and appreciate where we’ve been, our eyes are on the horizon and our foot is on the gas.

We hope you enjoy the new Tilting Point branding, check out our latest release in SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, and are inspired by our approach to progressive publishing.

To those that we’ve worked with over the past eight years, thank you! The best is yet to come. To those who we’ve yet to work with, we’d love to hear from you and get to work building the future of progressive publishing together. Drop us a line at hello@tiltingpoint.com.

Kevin Segalla is the Founder and CEO of Tilting Point. As an entrepreneur with multiple successful media and entertainment companies under his belt, Kevin founded Tilting Point in 2012 with an expressed vision of helping independent development studios to thrive in the rapidly growing mobile game space. Kevin has adhered steadfastly to that vision as the mobile game space and, in turn, Tilting Point have rapidly evolved. With an incredible team behind him, Tilting Point is making a significant mark in the game space.

Samir El-Agili is President and Chief Product Officer at Tilting Point, where he runs the day-to-day operations and drives the company’s service offering and product portfolio working with all development partners. As president and CPO of Tilting Point, Samir has been fundamental in the fast acceleration of the company in terms of staff, from 10 to over 130 employees and revenue growth, which has grown more than 800% between 2017 and 2019.

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From VentureBeat:

Tilting Point launches SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off and rebrands itself as a mobile publisher

Tilting Point is launching one of its biggest mobile games to date: SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off. And it is using the occasion to rebrand the company.

Tilting Point has always provided user acquisition services for mobile games, but now it will offer full publishing services for the free-to-play market, said Samir El-Agili in an interview with GamesBeat. El-Agili is the president and chief product officer of New York-based Tilting Point, and he said that the gaming industry has changed a lot since Tilting Point’s founding in 2012. And today’s news is one way that the company is adapting to the times and staying ahead of the curve on free-to-play mobile games.

The basic strategy is to start a relationship with a successful developer by offering them user acquisition and live services and move to co-development (where Tilting Point can fund further work on the project). This could possibly even lead to acquiring the developer in the end.

“What’s amazing about the SpongeBob brand is its mass appeal across the world and across ages, as it has a whole nostalgia effect and it’s a very clever show,” El-Agili said. And so Tilting Point is taking advantage of this spotlight to rebrand itself.

“We announced last year that we were transitioning the company from live publishing to a progressive publishing approach, which we start with live publishing, evolve it to co-development,” El-Agili said. “So we’re using this very important moment in the history of Tilting Point to announce a complete rebranding of the company. This is going to be a brand identity that’s going to resonate more with developers. We’re going to grow from powering up games to teaming up.”

Cooking up fun in Bikini Bottom

SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off is available now on iOS and Android. The game is the result of collaboration between Tilting Point, the co-development partners at Nukebox Games, and the licensing team at Nickelodeon.

Nukebox is one of India’s most successful mobile game companies. It created Food Truck Chef, where you play a chef in charge of a food truck. You have to juggle tasks and feed as many customers as possible on a timetable. I found it to be addictive when it launched in 2017.

That made Nukebox a good candidate to do a similar cooking game with the SpongeBob franchise, which is known around the world. Tilting Point brings its expertise in publishing, live game operations, and other tools to enable nonstop updates for the game over time.

El-Agili has high hopes for the game, as it had 16 million “pre-registrations” on Google Play alone. At the same time, the upcoming SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, has been pushed back from May to at least August 7. “We’re releasing this at a time when people are at home and they are consuming content faster than ever,” he said.

A new kind of publisher

With the new global brand identity for Tilting Point, the company will start to show off the new logo, color palette, and updated look and feel across Tilting Point’s games. The idea is to convey the company’s take on progressive publishing that redefines the relationship between developers, publishers, and intellectual property holders. El-Agili said that his company’s job is to “powerup” an existing game, where the company uses its methods for user acquisition and marketing campaigns to boost the game’s engagement, retention, and user base.

The game industry moves incredibly fast, and it’s important for modern publishers and developers to stay ahead of the game if they want to be successful. That’s where Tilting Point’s approach to progressive publishing comes in, El-Agili said.

Other game companies such as N3twork are also trying to do this with developers at early stages, but Tilting Point has largely engaged with developers that already have a successful game that can be taken to new heights. This takes a lot of the risk out of backing indie developers who aren’t as advanced.

If the user acquisition campaigns are successful and the relationship clicks, then Tilting Point will consider acquiring the game, as it did with Star Trek: Timelines, a sci-fi game that it got from Disruptor Beam (now Beamable). Using Beamable and Tilting Point’s technology, the Star Trek game was able to keep fans happy by quickly integrating events from the Star Trek: Picard into the game within a very short time.

This is what El-Agili calls the “team-up” phase, which can involve co-development as with Nukebox or acquisition.

“If you compare what we do to a venture capital model versus a private equity model, we’re more like the private equity company,” he said. “We’re not going to invest in 10 companies and just hope they succeed. We’re going to have to help a company that’s already quite big, make it bigger, and then we’re going to build a game together and then potentially if things make sense have a merger and acquisition.”

Tilting Point’s live operations tools can optimize a game for app stores, using proprietary tools for automating the production of ads, or giving developers access to AI tools for maximizing user acquisition spending. Tilting Point has also worked with teams at Hunted Cow, the co-development partners on Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest; and the team at Metagame Studios, which is working on Zombieland.

The results have been tremendous, El-Agili said. Revenue has grown more than 800% between 2017 and 2019, and the team has grown as well. Tilting Point has expanded from six employees in 2012, to 135 today across offices in New York City, Barcelona, Boston, Kiev, and Seoul. Altogether, the co-development network has more than 100 team members working on games at Nukebox Games, Hunted Cow, Metagame Studios, and Big Wolf Games, bringing the total extended team to more than 250 developers, marketers, data scientists, and designers.

A bigger mission

During the coronavirus, the business has changed dramatically. It is no longer as expensive to acquire new users with marketing campaigns. People have more disposable time and fewer choices for going out or entertaining themselves. They are turning to games and are more likely to respond to campaigns. So the cost of user acquisition is dropping.

“It’s very impactful from a business standpoint,” El-Agili said. “It’s good for a company like ours because our CPI [cost per install] is going down and engagement with consumers is going up. So existing games are performing better naturally. Ad revenue is going down as brands pull back, but we don’t have that much advertising revenue. It’s also becoming harder for developers to find money now. All of those reasons are why we have a lot of business coming through our doors now.”

Developers are looking for low-cost alternatives to boost their games and make more money. In April, Tilting Point saw a record month in terms of revenues. This makes it a good time to help other developers as well as launch the SpongeBob game.

And this good fortune has made El-Agili reflect on his time in the game business, as he always felt a sense of purpose. El-Agili is half German and half Tunisian. He was born and raised in France, but he also just became an American citizen. He is proud to be running a very international company with people in offices like New York and Barcelona. “There’s always this question of whether or not you make a difference to the world,” he said. “I was an aerospace engineer and I wanted to go to the moon like every kid and I wanted to change the world when I was young. But instead, I am making video games.”

And yet he has a renewed sense of purpose during the lockdown. “We were helping people who are going through a lot to escape, and we’re helping people who are sad and living alone and so on,” El-Agili said. “So it feels good in some sense that we can help right now. It gives us a sense of purpose.”

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More Nick: Nickelodeon Announces Voice Cast for 'Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years', First-Ever 'SpongeBob SquarePants' Spinoff!

Originally published: Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at 21:36 BST.

Original source: Gamasutra.

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