Avenging MySpace

A decade ago, Chris DeWolfe ran the world’s most successful website, one that facebook turned into a punch line. now DeWolfe is back, seeking permanence in the ephemeral sphere of mobile games.

- Kathleen Chaykowski

Château-Crème-a-Lot is a digital fortress of giant wafers, dipped cones and marshmallow swirls. It’s one of several dessert islands where the bright-eyed Chef Panda solves puzzles with shaped chocolates to earn ingredients to make everything from cookies to cake pops on a quest to be the best confectioner. Sounds silly, but it’s serious business. Chef Panda is the star of Cookie Jam Blast, a new game by Jam City, a seven-year-old mobile-gaming company in Culver City, California. It’s a spin-off of Jam City’s most successful franchise, Cookie Jam, which has been downloaded more than 100 million times and generated about half a billion dollars in revenue since its 2014 debut.

“We expect Cookie Jam to be around 50 years from now,” says Jam City cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, 51. Such longing for permanence seems jarring in the hyperactive world of smartphone gaming, but it makes perfect sense when one recalls that in a prior life DeWolfe was the CEO and cofounder of MySpace, the pioneering social media company that most definitely did not become Facebook. This time he wants his creation to stick around.

It’s off to a good start. Since its launch in 2010, Jam City has become one of the fastest-growing private mobile-gaming companies, amassing 50 million monthly users and sending six titles to the charts that track the 100 highest-grossing games. It competes with giants such as Activision Blizzard, Tencent-owned Supercell and Electronic Arts.

“There are only about ten companies who have had more than one game in the top 100,” says Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who estimates the mobile-gaming market at $40 billion. “Getting more than one means you’ve figured out a formula that’s impressive.”