Our story begins

Our humble beginnings started in Vancouver, Canada in 2008 when veteran video game designer Steve Bocska — formerly of Disney, Electronic Arts, Vivendi — founded the company (originally called “Pug Pharm”) to create multiplayer online social video games. But by 2010 we saw a bigger opportunity: to use proven gameplay designs and technologies to solve business problems such as community loyalty, engagement, insights and user activation for big brands. With this vision, we decided to reposition ourselves towards the emerging opportunity of customer engagement and “gamification.”

Core beliefs

As time went on, we saw greater and greater opportunity for enterprises – big brands and others – to take advantage of the potential arising today for deep community engagement in our “Pokemon Go” world, where young and old users alike are increasingly willing to interact with brands online in fun and interesting new ways. But our “game designer DNA” told us that oversimplified approaches like slapping points-badge-and-leaderboard mechanics around wouldn’t magically resuscitate a disengaged customer. It would take a unique perspective and technologies capable of delivering proven engagement mechanics such as collaboration, competition, customization, and collection.

Today

With offices in Vancouver, Toronto, Dallas, and Mexico, our team is bursting with amazing video game and interaction designers, business analysts, and social technological experts. Working with our versatile Picnic™ Customer Engagement Hub, we create compelling experiences for the top brands around the world that not only deliver 8x-12x times the demonstrable engagement of more basic community loyalty offerings, but does so in a highly scalable, flexible way with an extremely low cost of operation.