Tag: Hands-On Mobile

Mobile Games on Twitter

On 19/04/2009

Birds (sic!) do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, and now even Oprah (have you been there before her? Check here)… so: what about mobile games companies tweeting? Now, there’s many of them already out there (see list below) but how much sense does it make (that it makes sense for your business I demonstrated recently)?

Looking at a few of them, you’ll find anything from very 20th-century in-your-face selling (probably not so efficient) to enlisting (or trying to) followers to help in everything from game design, logo colours to community components that should go into the next iteration of the website. And it is in the crowdsourcing where I see a bit of potential: most mobile games companies are fairly small, and money to spend on sophisticated research, focus groups and what not is scarce or AWOL. If one can draw on the opinions and insights of friendly followers to learn about their (the consumers’) preferences, this is surely all good. Since Oprah is on there now, too, there is even a chance that your followers will not only be fellow industry professionals…

Although, even to the industry, Twitter is as powerful a tool to the mobile games people as to anything else (maybe with the exception of the global car-wash industry – everyone who’s been to CTIA Wireless will understand the reference): it is a great channel to get the message out to people who matter to you (and who actually show that they care by following you), which puts trade marketing (even if not in the strict sense of the word) onto the list on why you should do it.

So here’s a (surely incomplete – please excuse and feel free to add!) list of mobile games companies who tweet:

EA: @eamobile

Gameloft: @gameloft

Connect 2 Media (yes, that’s us): @connect2media

Glu: @glumobile

Oasys Mobile: @oasysmobile

Hands-On Mobile: @handsonmobile

Digital Chocolate: @dchocgames

I-Play: @iplaymobile

Namco: @namconetworks

Tag Games: @taggames

Fishlabs: @fishlabs

Gamevil: @gamevil

Distinctive Developments: @distinctivegame

Lemonquest: @lemonquest

Kiloo: @jacob_kiloo

Oh, and I’m out there as @vhirsch…

Vivendi Mobile Games is History

By Volker

On 24/11/2008

It had been announced previously and now it seems to be confirmed: Vivendi Mobile Games, the mobile games publishing arm of what now is Activision Blizzard, has closed its doors in Europe (after it apparently already did so in the US two weeks ago).

Background information on any reasons is hard to come by. Inability to control costs is a rumour frequently heard. One might also think that the overriding business outlook of Activision, which has been licensing out its titles pretty successfully to the likes of Hands-On Mobile (Call of Duty 1, 2, 3, True Crime: NYC, True Crime LA, Guitar Hero III an IV) and Glu (Call of Duty 4 and 5) – and perhaps less successfully to the now defunct Infospace Mobile (see here where they ended up) who did or planned to do Tony Hawks et al on the one hand, and the Blizzard unit that has a game on its hands that is awesomely succes

sful but hard to translate to mobile (namely World of Warcraft) did not leave room for a unit that could successfully compete internally.

Given that Activision’s CEO had also announced (transcript of its respective earnings call here) it would divest/retire a lot of its more casual Sierra unit (because they could not be sequelled on an annual basis; see some analysis here), the demise of VMG might therefore point more to a strategic decision on Activision’s side.

I'm back!

By Volker

On 27/08/2008

It’s been a while, 3 1/2 months to be exact, since I last found the spare moment to post to my blog. The main reason for the busy, busy time that forced me into blogging silence can be found here. I hope you will not expect me to comment further on this: I had made it an unwritten rule not to cover things directly involving my day job, and this must remain so in particular in this specific instance, which I trust you appreciate.

However, since this deal is done now, I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts with you again. Stay put and thanks for being so patient!

Oasys out of Chapter 11

By Volker

On 15/10/2007

Oh, the bliss of creditor protection… US mobile publisher Oasys emerged from Chapter 11 after defaulting on a rather sizable $8m debt earlier this year. They had $2m in assets versus $11.8m in debt. Not good. Now they apparently managed to persuade investors to convert debt into equity and off they go again. It was all – more or less – pre-arranged: their investors Associated Partners and Rock Hill Partners had apparently agreed to swap debt for equity, and agreed some interim funding, which apparently allowed them to continue product development. Sitting tight in the interim, they now managed indeed what they had told, namely to emerge as the Phoenix from the flames. For how long? Heaven knows. They have announced a couple of titles but will find arguably not find it easy to compete against the ever tightening battlefield that is mobile game publishing. They had been quick to assure that they would continue “business as usual” and – in particular – would pay licensors pre- and post-restructuring, which will be crucial if they want to see the light of day.

UNO and Phil Hellmuth poker are good titles. Will they be enough though? Their investors seem to think so: the restructuring plan, which the investors apparently supported, foresaw to turn away from their attempts in the D2C market and want to run as a “normal” ASP and publisher. If they can win the carrier decks, this might just work. However, in the poker category, my dear employer’s WPT Texas Hold’Em and Glu’s World Series of Poker titles go strong, and Oasys will face an uphill struggle with their title. UNO could be cool though it won’t be a home run either. Nonetheless: competition is good though! Go on, guys!

Zed's community is precious!

By Volker

On 09/10/2007

In Social

Zed announced that it “will unveil a bunch of hugely ambitious community services at CTIA”. The new stuff was apparently previewed at a closed press briefing in Madrid today, to which, alas, I was not privy… Test services will apparently go live in two weeks’ time during CTIA.

Zed had announced it had invested a whopping EUR50 million in a web 2.0/mobile 2.0 strategy to drive subscriptions around community services “such as multiplayer gaming, IM, blogging and so on”.

After former owner Sonera had sunk legendary fortunes into developing Zed into some monster brand, most people thought it was more or less doomed. When Spanish group LaNetro took them over though, it re-positioned itself and, with 85% in-house produced own content (no royalties) and sometimes contested subscription bodels grew revenues to a rather impressive $320m in 2006.

Now, in the community area, Zed is said to contribute some of the cash it invested into statiOn, an application for PC and mobile that consolidates all these services in one place for Zed subscribers. Version 2 (what a fitting version number for a web 2.0 app) will apparently be launched at CTIA.

Whilst I believe it is entirely on the money to predict that “the mobile market will go the same way as the wired internet in the direction of community services”, I am not sure if a – arguably complex-ish – PC-mobile application is the way out; this does not give anyone anything new. In fact, a lot of social networks and communities already today seamlessly evolve into platform-agnostic things: Jaiku uses mobile as a major part, Facebook Mobile sees more users, MySpace and, again, Facebook have announced recent deals in the mobile space, Yospace (acquired by Emap; see also here) is serving 3 and O2 UK, my fine employer Hands-On Mobile has launched Yatta-Video on SFR and soon on other carriers, and everyone else has a “social network” or “community” suite on offer. So will we really need a specific application (downloadable?) that will help connect the two media? Isn’t it much rather about seamless — dare I say it? — convergence WITHOUT the need for additional (complex) application layers? Isn’t this one of the public secrets of web 2.0, its incredible ease of use?

Zed concludes its analysis that “the future is certainly not in solo personalisation products”. Well, yes, that might be true but is it really well enough positioned to capture users on their quest into the social networks, too, in particular in the light of the above? I will never ever discount Zed again, so I am truly intrigued by what they will announce and I really hope it is something exciting and innovative. Go on!