PORTAGE, MI – Billboards with bananas, which have recently appeared alongside busy roads, is S2 Games' way of letting the community know a globally-known video game developer is creating virtual worlds from the Kalamazoo area.



But the seven-year-old company, which has grown exponentially over the past two years thanks to a popular “Heroes of Newerth” or “HoN” battle-arena PC-computer game, isn't monkeying around when it comes to business.

Besides approaching the release for an updated version of its best-known game, the company plans to expand globally and technologically with a new mobile phone division in 2013.

“I wanted to let Kalamazoo know that there is a company in town that makes video games. I think there’s value to that because it’s a massive, $57-billion industry,” said 35-year-old Marc DeForest, the company’s founder and CEO. “Everyone is playing and talking about video games and there are not a lot of people in Michigan making them.”

The first expansion took place in 2012, when the company hired 49 employees, doubling what is now a 90-person staff comprised mostly of males in their mid-20s.

More than half of those employees – with job titles ranging from graphic designers, 2-D illustrating artists, animators, programmers and content managers – work in Portage, but a 16-person art team is based in California, where Jesse Hayes, a founder and the director of art, is located.

The billboards are a play on the company’s logo, the face of a cartoon gorilla, which is etched on the glass-paned front doors of the S2 Games new corporate suite, which is covered in portraits of video game heroes.

Two weeks ago, the company moved its headquarters from Oshtemo Township into an 18,000-square-foot space in the Portage Trade Centre, a location highly visible from Interstate 94 near South Westnedge Avenue exit.

The move was less about needing space, and more about taking the company to the next level.

“When the game first saw the light of day it had a good following,” DeForest said. “It’s more popular today than it has ever been and that is extremely impressive after two years. We have 2.5 million active users.”

HoN, which is available for free online, is a fantasy game where multiple players with avatars team up for arena-style battles. Each player creates a customized hero with various skills or powers.

While HoN has been updated various times and HoN 3.0 will be released “very soon,” DeForest says the business model is where adaptation has been most crucial. The game originally cost users $30 to play, but in an effort to stay competitive with free online games, the pay wall was removed in May 2012.

S2 Games altered the pay model a few times. The company profits by charging real money for the virtual currency that players use in the game to pay for cosmetic upgrades to their account to enhance the quality of the game.

DeForest says HoN is considered one of the most popular computer games in Thailand and the company continues to see growth in Southeast Asia, where it has already has regional

partners for marketing.

S2 Games just cemented a new partnership in China, which has the largest population of gamers and who currently do not have access to the game, DeForest said.

“By the end of this year, we’ll be up and running in China and that has massive potential,” he said. “Life is about expectation management, so I don’t want to set too lofty goals, but I do expect growth and we’re going be happy with whatever it will be. It will be more than what we have now.”

Also, S2 is looking to establish a mobile division, which will be a subsidiary of S2 Games called iGames, a company DeForest has owned since 2002, before the age of the smartphone. He believes mobile games have huge potential to bridge the gap between casual and experienced gamers.

“We’re all really passionate about mobile gaming,” he said. “This isn’t going to stop our investment or growth for the PC, but in the future of a lot of things revolve around the accessibility of a tablet.”

DeForest is already accepting applications for a 12-person mobile division and he hopes some of those hires will be local people.

While he remains mum on the details, DeForest confirmed that a team is working on developing a new mystical, "lore-centric" game.

Besides being the CEO of S2 Games, a father of three and a husband, DeForest is also known in the HoN gamer world as "Maliken," an avatar well-known in the HoN world.

“My wife could attest to this -- my favorite game of all time is HoN and that’s not just lip service,” he said. “When new games come out I try them, but I can’t help wanting to play HoN.”

DeForest will discuss the release of the HoN 3.0, the new mobile division, and his hopes for the future of technology businesses in Kalamazoo on Tuesday, Jan. 22 at 2 p.m. during a MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette live chat.



Contact Ursula Zerilli at uzerilli@mlive.com or 269-254-5295. Follow her on twitter.