Having closed two recent deals with international partners, Gogii Games of Moncton is looking forward to gaining more customers and revenue and adopting a more aggressive production schedule in 2014.

The developer of casual games recently struck a partnership with Microsoft to have Windows Phone platforms feature 31 Gogii titles from its back catalogue of iOS-based games. It’s substantial because Windows Phone is the fastest growing platform in the gaming market.

But in a recent interview, Founder and CEO George Donovan spoke more about the company’s distribution with Pocket Gems, a San Francisco-based game developer and distributer.

To understand why the Pocket Gems is so exciting to Donovan, it helps to understand the complexity of the casual gaming business model. These developers let users download games for free then encourage them to pay for additional features and add-ons.  It generally costs $2 to $4 to acquire a customer, and about 100,000 installs a day are needed to make the iTunes charts. So games makers have to find cheap ways to gain lots of clients.

Though it’s only five years old, Pocket Gems has been responsible for 150 million installs of games, and last year it booked revenues of $82 million. That’s what has Donovan excited.

“They’re going to bring us a significant number of customers but also market intelligence and user acquisition in California,” said Donovan, of the deal which will launch within 60 days on Android and iOS products. “They’ll be great as a trend analyst.”

He added Pocket Gems has spent months analyzing the market and “they deemed our games to be worthy to be in their network.”  Gogii launched with Pocket Gems on iOS last month, climbing to the No. 7 spot in North America in the Feb 8 weekend.

Gogii engaged with Microsoft in November through mutual contacts at Unity Technology, a maker of gaming engines. “After a quick discussion, they were excited about the quality and the volume of the games we have,” said Donovan, whose titles include Pet Zoometery and Archie: Betty or Veronica. “They had no idea that a company in Atlantic Canada was sitting on a catalogue of 70 titles … and the fact that we had some many No. 1 titles in the casual gaming market place.”

The deals are refreshing news for a company that has had a few challenging years. As often happens in the gaming industry, revenues declined in 2013 and the company had to more than halve its staffing.  Though it’s been tough, Gogii has performed better than many video games. Donovan noted that about two video game companies close each week in the U.S., and not all of them are small operations.

Gogii now has 21 employees, and has two active products in development.  These games are the beginning of Gogii’s return to an aggressive production schedule, and Donovan envisions the production of five to six games in the next few years. The company plans to release 20 to 25 games with Microsoft in the next few months. The company’s catalogue of Archie titles, especially with the new partnerships, should provide a steady revenue stream.

“There still needs to be content for the video game space,” said Donovan. “As long as we can we can earmark ourselves with a good partners, we will be a much bigger player.”