@ GDC: How Mobile Game Developers Avoid The Carrier’s Deck In Japan
David Collier, who runs a mobile content provider in Tokyo called Pikkle, told developers today at GDC Mobile how Japanese game developers are avoiding two of the industry’s biggest headaches—sharing revenue with carriers and porting the same game to hundreds of handsets.
“There is a new type of application category that will bring us out of the claws of the carrier and bring us to the promised land of mobile entertainment,” he said. In Japan, Collier said the trend is to create short, simple games based on Adobe’s (NSDQ: ADBE) Flash Lite that create games in a browser. In one game Collier demonstrated, a waiter grabbed the food as a buffet passed by. In another, the player creates an avatar and a room, where friends could visit and leave a message.
He said by using Flash, the developers won’t have to tweak an application for every phone because it runs in the browser which are fairly standard. And because it’s not an application, it also means that developers can avoid the carrier’s deck as being the main point of distribution. “With Java or Brew, you don’t spend that much on the initial game, but then you do when porting it. Even with Flash if you spend a lot on the initial game, the porting cost is next to minimal,” he said. For one Japanese site, he tested the game on 20 phones, but it ended up supporting about 200. “Flash does solve a lot of the porting problems, when you are turning around a lot of games every week,” he added.
He said the games have been phenomenally successful. The most popular is Mobile Game Town, which for context, said has three times as much traffic as Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO) Mobile, and gets about 15 billion page views a month. The company has 7 million registered users, and nearly 1 million Flash games are played daily. He said the business model is still evolving, but many of them rely on Flash ads inside the games. In some cases, people also pay monthly subscription fees.
Posted In: Entertainment, Gaming, Countries, Asia, david collier, gdc
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Comments (2)
Feb 20, 2008 7:31 AM
Flash Lite games/entertainment applications are mighty fine: but whom is making a margin from these today? What about tomorrow? Who says operators will not react in one way or another? Will we see an army of bedroom coders flooding the arena with mediocre, trite, rude, or darn right indecent content which operators will want off their phones? Whom regulates the browser access of handsets? Is this to trigger a walled garden second coming?
I see this more as a regulatory and a quality of experience issue as I can well imagine operators either not liking to have content downloaded without fees (fixed or zero rated data/subscription plans being more common) or not liking what is being downloaded as degrading the perceived value of their service. As for folk desperate enough for porn on their mobiles, I guess they will want the real thing and possible be booted into megabyte priced downloads anyway (I suspect flash animation are lighter than video clips, and fall within “fair usage” conditions).
Maybe it will open the gate for mobile phone media specific artists and satirists. Maybe it will be a flash - lite - in the pan. Maybe it will be a revolution. I suspect Adobe making money from selling the player to the manufacturers whom successfully sell the idea to the operators. Otherwise, it means selling the player to existing phone users - an expensive proposition to market.
We’ll see ... Personally, I just would like to have better phone platforms on the market, and the phasing out of network service support on the content side for phones over two years old from the date of their launch. That would help industry some.
Feb 20, 2008 4:09 PM
This is the situation we are seeing with Javascript/Ajax games on the iPhone in the USA. Rapid development and rapid return on investment.
We recently launched a series of casino games under the Kenny Rogers - The Gambler brand to great success.
I hope this model gets extended to more handsets. In Europe, many of the newer handsets run the same sort of WEBKIT as iPhone does, so that is also a possible market.
William Volk
MyNuMo