Inside Hutch: the mobile game studio representing London at Apple's WWDC 2019 event

Hutch developers will be flying the flag for London at the annual Apple event 
From L-R: Shaun Rutland, CEO of Hutch, Phil Schiller, Apple's SVP of international marketing, Andy Watson, COO of Hutch, Rachel Edwards, producer at Hutch, and Jonathan Alpine, Hutch design director, at the company's east London office
Apple
Amelia Heathman3 June 2019

For Apple fans and general tech enthusiasts, the company’s September keynote, when it announces its new iPhones and products, is the number one event in the calendar.

However, the annual developer event WWDC, which takes place every June, is arguably more important. It's here that the world gets its first look at the new software coming to Apple products.

There’s the main keynote on Monday, and then after that, the week is full of different events and workshops for the thousands of developers in attendance to find out how the new Apple way of working will affect their businesses and products.

Attending this year’s conference, for the fifth time in a row, are developers from hit London mobile game studio, Hutch. It feels particularly pertinent for the studio to be welcomed to the annual event because the company wouldn’t exist without the App Store.

The studio started eight years ago in East London by five co-founders who had previously worked together at PlayStation but had grown frustrated with the console way of gaming. Intrigued by the opportunities offered by the App Store, the team decided to fund a new mobile studio themselves and set a deadline of eight months to make the first game.

“The App Store provided an environment where you could publish your own ideas - you didn't really have any gatekeepers of ideas and it was very different on console. Also, the devices were really interesting,” Hutch CEO Shaun Rutland tells the Standard.

“We launched a game, made a million dollars in the first six months and it enabled us to build the business from there."

Hutch's game director Corey talking Phil Schiller through the Hutch's next hit game
Apple

So far, Hutch has made 10 games, all focused on racing. The latest app is F1 Manager, made in official partnership with Formula One, which is similar to Football Manager but instead of running a football team, the player heads up their own F1 team. The studio employs 75 people, with hopes to grow the head count to 100 in 2019, and plans to make $38 million in revenue this year.

Recently, Hutch welcomed Apple’s Phil Schiller, SVP of international marketing and head of the App Store, into its Shoreditch-based studio to see how it all works.

Apple says it's important to establish relationships with the developers, to get out and see the apps and games they’re creating for the App Store.

“It’s why we do what we do,” Schiller tells the Standard. “We create this platform with products and innovative tools in the hopes that all these bright developers will then use them to create things that customer will just love using.”

For Rutland, this visit and recognition demonstrate just how far Hutch has come. “It’s a massive milestone for us to think a few years ago we were just trying to start a business and now we have the guy who on the stage inspired us to start this, actually in the office,” he says.

WWDC 2019: The developer announcements to look out for

This year’s WWDC is particularly exciting for Apple as it’s going to focus on the next version of all its platforms. When the event officially started 30 years ago, it was all about the Mac. Now, developers are flying in to see what’s new with iOS for iPhone and iPad, WatchOS for watches as well as the new macOS software. At the core of it all is the bringing together of software engineers with Apple engineers to discuss what is coming next.

Attending WWDC is “invaluable” for developers, says Rutland. “[The team] come back and they present to the rest of the studio about what they’ve learned, the things and trends we need to look at. And, we think about how we’re going to iterate on Apple’s new technology and ideas.”

In 2018, the headline news centred around ARKit, Apple’s augmented reality developer tech, so what’s going to be the focus this year? In true Apple style, Schiller isn’t revealing much. “It’s going to be a truly huge show for us,” he says.

Things to look out for will be the way Apple’s products fit together and the experiences this enables, as well as making it easier for developers to build their machine learning algorithms, and of course updates to ARKit.

Hutch game director Ian Griffths with Phil Schiller: Apple says it's important to get out and meet the developers that create experiences for Apple platforms and products
Apple

“We’re still at the beginning of laying that foundation, the technologies that have to be built out to make it truly valuable to everybody,” he says. “Last year we brought lots of user experiences to AR and that opened up new capabilities for developers to do things they couldn’t do until we provided that. We’re going to continue to keep pushing the technology to make AR more and more relevant.”

What’s next for Hutch? The studio is making changes and upgrades to F1 Manager to constantly improve the gameplay. As well, it’s working on its next game, Rebel Racing, currently in development. It seems that gamble, eight years ago, to leave console gaming and venture into the relatively unknown world of mobile has paid off.

“What mobile is amazing for is that these games are made for people that don’t think they are gamers, and they end up gaming because there’s so much content on a variety of things they care about,” says Rutland. “And it’s just an incredible marketplace. You can reach two billion people across the world, you can’t do that with consoles.”

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