MANILA — The creator of the hugely popular Facebook Messenger game EverWing has confirmed that Filipinos are their biggest market globally, and is now thus set to further cater to the country by launching a Filipino fairy through a contest.
“There is such an affinity for the types of products we want to build that we’d focus on the Philippines first,” said Michael Carter, CEO of Blackstorm Labs. “The Philippines now has the most users, the most games played, the most boss raids, the most dragons collected, pretty much across the board everything is the most.”
Carter said their Philippine users now number at 12 million, the most of any country in the world with the United States a far second at about half the Philippine number. Carter even surmised that the US might have landed on second only because there is also a huge population of Filipinos there.
Last July, Blackstorm Labs already did a local campaign with Smart Communications by launching five locally themed dragons, or sidekicks that fairies team up with to battle monsters in the game. To follow up on their initial campaign, Carter said they are now ironing out a possible contest to allow fans to create a Filipino fairy.
“We actually want to put together a Philippine-based fairy and we want to do it like a competition or a contest and so maybe a particular person could become the model for the fairy,” Carter said. “We are still working out the dynamics for what that would be like, but it’ll be like something that will allow all the players to have a say in it and vote or choose who they think would be the best fairy.”
Carter said he has high hopes, not just for EverWing but on the platform where they operate, a space he dubbed the “post-app” technology where new apps are built on already successful apps, like how EverWing works on the Facebook Messenger platform via Instant Games.
As there is now almost an app for everything, giving rise to what some calls “app fatigue,” Carter said layering on already successful apps enables developers to immediately reach scale by tapping on already established networks while providing a more social and seamless user experience as users need not download any large file.
As for monetization, Carter said they are now exploring different possibilities, possibly by experimenting in their biggest market, the Philippines.