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Playing Away - Mobile Games

Examining opportunities for games delivered to mobile phones.

NMK event report from April 2003.

Supported by Business Link for London, www.bl4london.com

While stuck in a particularly slow-moving supermarket queue recently, boredom drove me to check out some of the previously ignored features on my Nokia phone. Normally my mobile is strictly reserved for phone calls and texting, but on this occasion I became so absorbed in the slightly clunky pinball game I'd discovered on the handset that I was soon holding up a line of impatient shoppers, while my groceries piled up in an untended heap at the end of the check-out.

I'm not alone in spending more of my downtime (at the bus stop, on the train or in the supermarket) peering at the tiny screen on my phone, thumbs furiously working the keypad in search of a high score. Mobile games are steadily increasing in popularity, and telecom operators, content developers and aggregators are banking on them becoming a major money-spinner.

Developing Mobile Games

For developers, mobile games are still some way from being a dead-cert route to healthy profits. The market for games on phones is still relatively immature, and if the companies producing the content want to profit from their work, they'll have to be prepared to milk their intellectual property for all it’s worth. This is one of the lessons to emerge from NMK and BAFTA’s recent seminar on mobile games, where John Abbott, MD of games developers Hailstorm, described the evolution of one of his company’s successful products.

‘Trapped’ began life as a simple WAP game in which players were required to navigate a maze while avoiding deadly rolling boulders (the scariest hazard it’s possible to render in 5 pixels by 5, says John). Because of the limitations of WAP, the original ‘Trapped’ was turn-based, re-loading a new page every time the player interacted with the game. This version attracted a healthy 10,000 users back in late 2001, generating 100,000 game sessions.

The game then enjoyed a new lease of life in re-skinned guise as a promotional tool for Disney’s ‘Monsters Inc’ movie in the US, generating 100,000 new users and one million minutes of playtime. Around the same period, the game was also re-branded for another client in Germany and the Netherlands.

Hailstorm then overhauled the game again, creating a more sophisticated, arcade version in C++ that was embedded in one million Innostream handsets, hardwired into the phones at the factory. John and his colleagues have now also produced a downloadable arcade version for Java-enabled phones.

Clearly, Hailstorm has figured out how to make good intellectual property go a long way. Although the original game didn’t recoup the advance paid to develop it, subsequent versions have been profitable. In light of his experiences, John offered the following advice to those working in mobile games:

Tips for Developers

• Be as flexible as possible by creating re-skinnable games
• Support multiple programming languages from the outset
• Write tools that can be used across different versions of the game
• Select distributors who offer other good quality games
• Provide marketing materials along with the games you provide
• Playability and broad appeal are crucial

Tips for Operators, Distributors, Aggregators and Publishers

• Gather quality, not quantity
• Offer a mixture of branded and original games
• Market games themselves, not the site or channel that hosts them
• Work directly with developers
• Branded games are popular - even if the game was not originally designed for a brand, the marketing push and element of trust and recognition will drive demand.

Media Brands and Commercial Relationships

With online gaming over the web it is viable for a single company to develop a game and distribute, market and sell it to consumers. Not so with mobile games, where a wide range of different interests are likely to be involved. Kuju, a games company based in Sheffield and London, has enjoyed success with an SMS version of TV quiz show The Weakest Link. As Balbir Blugan, Head of Business Development at Kuju, explained, bringing The Weakest Link to our phones involved a commercial relationship between four companies (BBC Worldwide, Orange, aggregator/distributor Digital Bridges and Kuju themselves), all of which were seeking a return on their investment, often in several territories.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that different partners had different priorities: while Kuju, Orange and Digital Bridges all hoped to generate revenue from the game, the BBC’s priority was to promote its show and stay true to its remit towards license payers (for this reason, an under-18s version of the game was also produced, in which it was impossible for players to incur a huge bill.)

The way the deal worked was that Digital Bridges licensed the game from the BBC, and Orange then licensed the game from Digital Bridges for a finite period of exclusivity. As the developer commissioned to make the game, Kuju were “at the bottom of the food chain”, and only stood to make a profit if everyone else did.

With such a complicated set of relationships, Kuju had finished developing the game before the ink was dry on all of the contracts relating to the project. For anyone working on similar projects, Balbir advised ensuring that no more than two parties are involved in any contract, unless you want to spend months involved in contractual negotiations. She also recommends constant communication between all parties, as each will want some input into the creative, production and commercial aspects of the game, and difficulties over sign-off can create lengthy delays in production schedules.

Proper planning is also essential: several movie tie-ins have already been released long after the films they were supposed to promote had left the cinemas because the games were commissioned too late.

Not all film, TV and entertainment brands work well on mobile platforms, according to Balbir, and even The Weakest Link’s format had to undergo significant changes to fit the requirements of the medium. Educational content is generally unpopular, but quiz formats with multiple choice questions lend themselves perfectly to SMS games.

Aggregation and Distribution

Digital Bridges are one of the largest players in the mobile games market, having been involved in the provision of mobile content sincen they were founded in 1998. In an industry that has seen several false starts, the company’s Senior Vice President of Marketing, Paul Maglione, believes that we have finally reached a point where mobile content can thrive.

With mobile phone penetration close to saturation point in most European countries, and all of the major handset manufacturers established in these markets, the focus of the industry has shifted from attracting new users to the churn rate among existing users. Mobile content, including games, could be what drives customers to buy a new handset or change networks.

At the same time, handset and network technology is finally living up to customer’s expectations of what a mobile, interactive experience should involve - with colour screens, faster processors, larger displays, increased bandwidth, more memory and Java capabilities.

Despite the importance of technical advances, however, Paul believes it is vital not to try to sell a set of technologies to customers, or raise their expectations too high. The main lesson learned from WAP was that consumers are interested in the services they can access, rather than the means of receiving them. Similarly, game play and interfaces are what matter to gamers – the technology should be invisible.

Tim Harrison, Head of Mobile Games at Vodafone Global Content Services, is also keen to keep mobile content as user-friendly as possible by avoiding too much emphasis on technology (he prefers the term ‘downloadable games’ to ‘java games’). Games are one of the most popular services on the Vodafone Live entertainment channel, and Tim believes the potential for growth is huge, arguing that while most handsets now have similar capabilities to a mid-Eighties home computer or arcade machine, the market penetration of mobile phones is far in excess of that for games consoles.

Vodafone are one of several companies that have now developed a number of more sophisticated billing options for mobile games players, including safeguards to ensure that customers do not download games and incur charges accidentally without opting in, and a system to prevent pay-as-you-go customers using up their credit if they don’t have enough to download a whole game. The company’s games even pause themselves automatically in the unlikely event that somebody actually phones you up while you're playing!

So where next for mobile games? Tim’s outlook is fairly cautious, on the grounds that consumers have not yet wholly accepted the idea that phones are more than just devices for talking and texting. He believes that in the next year it will be vital to manage customer expectations, and avoid getting carried away with the possibilities of more advanced gaming experiences such as wireless networked games or location-based entertainment. These are for the future, but right now we need a steady supply of fresh, good quality, playable games to allow the market to grow - however simple they might appear to be. After all, chess is still a great game when played with little bits of wood and cardboard.

The next event in the 'Digital Synergies' series, on Interactive TV, will take place at BAFTA on 9th July 2003: www.nmk.co.uk/gbitv03.cfm.

This event was produced by Stephen Jeffery-Poulter, and presented in association with:

and

This event was supported by Business Link for London (www.bl4london.com )

Speaker Profiles

Paul Maglione, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Digital Bridges
Paul Maglione, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Digital Bridges, is in charge of accelerating the company’s penetration into the global market. An international media executive with over 20 years experience, Paul previously held positions with CNN Interactive Europe, NBC Europe and Turner Broadcasting, and has a BA from Brown University and a Sloan MBA from London Business School. Digital Bridges is a world leader in mobile entertainment providing the distribution channels, content, brands and technology to bring mobile entertainment to a global mass-market audience. The company’s proprietary interactive content server platform (UNITY) generates, delivers and monitors usage of multi-device, multi-user and multi-language interactive entertainment content and community services. Digital Bridges' publishing (dbi) arm works with the industry’s most innovative game developers to create exceptional mobile entertainment solutions, and also publishes mobile entertainment applications based on globally recognised licenses from many of the major media and entertainment brands including Star Trek, Thunderbirds, Cartoon Network, The Weakest Link, Space Invaders and EA Sports Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf.

Tim Harrison, Head of Mobile Games, Vodafone Global Content Services
Tim Harrison is Head of Mobile Games at Vodafone Global Content Services and leads the development of the group’s mobile gaming strategy and commercial operations. Tim devised and developed the games offering for Vodafone’s groundbreaking Live! service launched last autumn and continues to oversee all areas of the proposition. The Vodafone Live! Games Arcade is now active in more than ten countries, and has been acclaimed for its ease of use and unparalleled depth and quality of content, with over 50 colour titles. Before joining Vodafone, Tim worked as a musician, a journalist for titles including Esquire and The Express and a consultant to a number of dot.com start-ups. His enthusiasm for the games industry was sparked at the age of 11, when he won £10 for writing a competition-winning BASIC game in Spectrum User magazine.

John Abbott, MD, Hailstorm
John Abbott will present a case study of Hailstorm's successful game Trapped!, which evolved from a WAP product into a full arcade game. Hailstorm is an independent mobile games studio, based in Banbury, which has developed games for platforms including J2ME, WAP, HDML, SMS and European iMode. The company has achieved commercial success, most notably in North America, and works with Mobile Scope AG, Cash-U and TTPcom in Europe. Co-founder John Abbott has over six years experience developing video games, from large console projects to small java games. John has a BSc Hons in Creative and Scientific Visualisation from the University of Teesside.

Balbir Blugan, Head of Business Development, Kuju
As Business Development Manager at Kuju Entertainment, Balbir Blugan's role has been to establish relationships with the key players in the mobile games industry and position Kuju Entertainment as a major operator in the sector. Before joining Kuju Entertainment, Balbir was International Marketing Manager at NxN Software - a games middleware developer. Balbir holds a BA Hons in Theology from St.Annes College, University of Oxford. Balbir will be discussing Kuju's conversion of TV's The Weakest Link to mobile platforms, and looking at the issues that arise when the worlds of games, telecoms and TV collide: IP/brand concerns, revenue models, production processes and formats.

Take a look at the original event.