In today’s ‘Meet the Members’ blogpost we talk to Björn Spies from Sparkling Society.
Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.
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Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your position in the company
Hi! I’m Björn Spies, Senior Game Developer at Sparkling Society and part of the management team as the so-called primus inter pares, first among equals, of the developers. Located in Delft, Sparkling Society creates free-to-play games for Google Play Store, Apple App Store and Microsoft Store, mostly focused on games within the city management genre. It all started back in 2013, when the company’s founders Edwin Morren & Mark Peeters released their first city management game called City Island. Almost 12 years and 30+ released games later Sparkling Society works towards new, feature-packed city building & management related games with a team of around 25 people.
Back in 2017, after Stolen Couch Games was disbanded after 7 years of which I was one of the co-founders, I joined Sparkling Society. With my expertise in Unity & multiplatform development during my years at Stolen Couch Games, I focused on getting Sparkling Society’s portfolio available at new markets, to reach as many players as possible who may be interested in our games. With a total of almost 200.000.000 downloads in about 12 years time, we already reached out to lots of players with our portfolio and love to reach even more possible players with what we have in store in the coming years.
We would love to see (or hear) some of your work! Example(s) of recent work or highlights you are proud of (what would you like to share)
By far the most important game series for our company is City Island, where the most recent entry in this series was released at the end of 2023. In City Island 6 the player focuses on creating beautiful cities across multiple islands, being the mayor of each of them while keeping the population happy to grow each city to great heights.
While working on the City Island series we already built up a wonderful, supportive player base, but we were still wondering what we could achieve within different niches of the build & manage genre. One of these titles, Zoo Life, was released near the end of 2022 and gives the player full power to create the zoo of their dreams by gathering all kinds of animals, attracting visitors and sharing their creations with other players. In a sense similar to the City Island series, built on the same foundation created years ago, but with a totally different look & feel, motivation and audience.
And last but not least, our most recent addition just released at the end of 2024, Cozy Town!
How long have you been a DGA member and what is your main reason for joining? What can DGA do to help your company?
As Sparkling Society we’ve been a DGA member for about three years now, mainly to support the Dutch games industry, but also to possibly share and gain knowledge about everything we encounter with the industry ourselves.
And of course the discounts for all those wonderful events. The number of events to visit keeps growing, always nice to have a discount!
What ambitions/plans do you have for your company?
Mostly continuing with what we do now: Creating feature-packed, optimised games within the build & manage genre based on everything we’ve learned, while looking for new opportunities to expand to new markets, new audiences and new niches!
Anything else you would like to share with us?
Keep doing what you do DGA! You all are a great help to the games industry, thank you for making it possible to be part of it!
Thank you, Björn! Find more info on their website: https://sparklingsociety.company
Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.