Will Wright made his name with games like SimCity, The Sims and Spore. Now he’s stepping out of the gaming world to join the ultra-competitive market for social photography apps, with a startup called Thred.
Backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Mayfield Fund, Betaworks, former Electronic Arts boss John Riccitiello and Foursquare chief executive Dennis Crowley, the free app has been released initially for Apple’s iPhone.
Wright is hoping that people will use the app to add filters, stickers and captions to their photos for purposes including creating and sharing memes; recording their holiday trips; and creating web comics.
“One of the fundamental ideas behind Thred is a better way to create and consume content for mobile,” said Wright as the app launched. “We provide quick and easy access to the sea of personal and global data we swim through every day as building blocks for the creative process.”
Thred’s challenge, as with all apps of its type, is tempting people away from the places they already swim through that sea of digital content: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and other apps with tens or hundreds of millions of users.
Further down the line, there is also the task of figuring out a business model, with advertising or in-app purchases of additional creative tools both options for a startup like Thred, if it can attract a sizeable community of people using it.
Wright certainly means business: Thred’s website lists a team of 18 employees including its founder working for the app’s parent company Syntertainment Incorporated, which raised $5m of funding in 2013 for its plans.
Wright’s move from games into social apps is not a huge surprise: he’s been talking about his interest in the latter since 2008, when I interviewed him for mobile gaming website Pocket Gamer.
Then, Wright enthused about how walking around cities with his camera had changed the way he looked at the world.
“I can imagine mobile platforms evolving in that way, in that they interact with the world around us in a way that changes our perceptions in a really interesting way,” he said. “Games could increase our awareness of our immediate environment, rather than distract us from it.”
Thred isn’t a game, but Wright’s comments on his new app mirror those thoughts from seven years ago.
“In recent years, I’ve been drawn more and more to new entertainment forms – ones that lead the user to become more engaged with the world around them, rather than withdrawn from it,” he said as it launched.
