With the conference season upon us, I shall be trekking to my former hometown of Hamburg on Monday to join the good folks from the Casual Games Association for their European iteration of Casual Connect. It looks like a pretty cool show with lots of interesting stuff going on, in particular also on social gaming and cross-platform initiatives: they have numerous panels and keynotes on both and a whole strand on mobile. Interesting speakers, too: Rob Unsworth (Digital Chocolate), Ami Ben-David (Oberon/I-Play), Philippe Dao (Gameloft) are there plus an interesting panel with Fishlabs’ Michael Schade and Handy Games’ Christopher Kassulke on the same panel (their two companies had a little bit of a tiff recently). I’ll be there to elaborate a bit more on mobile social gaming… Fingers crossed.
Tag: Oberon
It’s been the buzz for some time but no one had, with few exceptions, been seeing too much of it but now it seems to start taking off: cross-platform convergence of games. It is a bit of a holy grail: the network operators (or carriers) are not always the most creative and daring bunch when it comes to trying things out and they take a very healthy cut of the revenues from a tough, fragmented and still relatively small market. No wonder then that a lot of people are praying for alternative solutions. But, alas, it never really worked: every games publisher will tell you that, other than for music, wallpapers, etc, the direct-to-consumer model never really worked for games; the operators dominate the space as the, by far, most important distribution channels.
This could be, one thinks, overcome when more users would actually get themselves familiar with the games in a less constrained environment, the web being an immediate answer. Many have tried, many have failed (even the superstars of mobile games, Gameloft, stopped their in-house offering). But, hey, maybe it was just the wrong approach. Trip Hawkins‘ brainchild Digital Chocolate showed with their approach to their award-winning game TowerBloxx how it can also be done: they created a Facebook app and an online Flash version of the game that have been roaring successes: allegdely, the Flash game saw more than 10 million plays to date and the Facebook app has had 430,000 lifetime users. For a property that sprung from mobile, these are very respectable numbers indeed. And whilst I have no idea if it actually helped selling more games (300,000 clicked the “buy now” button but, for some odd reason, they don’t know how many actually bought it), it will have played its part to keeping the game in the front of people’s minds – and that’s half the work done, isn’t it?
Other players are onto it, too: online gaming giant Oberon Media bought mobile publisher I-Play last year in order to offer a more comprehensive line-up across media boundaries. Real is doing similar things. It is probably only a question of time before EA connects its pogo.com online destination with its mobile titles. I also know of quite a few smaller developers that start to very actively incorporate the multi-platform into their game design and development considerations. Very encouraging, that is!
And it makes so much sense of course: handsets get more and more powerful, the garden walles gardens start to come down with flat-rate data plans for mobiles becoming more and more the rule: all in all, a perfect runway for the ascent of convergent media consumption.
Now let’s add (mobile) Flash to the equation, and things could become very interesting indeed… (and, yes, I know, we may not yet have the install base but it’s getting there…)
Our recently very acquisitive friends from Oberon Media struck again to create one of the first truly focussed triple-play gaming houses. They now acquired Pixelplay, one of the giants on the interactive TV (iTV) sector. This together with their own online activities (Oberon powers e.g. MSN Games) and their recent acquisitions of Blaze and I-Play creates a rather explosive mix.
It will be interesting to see how they will manage to consolidate the whole thing with a view to the – at this time – still somewhat disparate portfolio: Pixelplay boasts the iTV licenses for the likes of Monopoly, Luxor, the World Poker Tour, etc, whilst I-Play excelled inter alia with “The Fast and the Furious“. Oberon’s ability to exploit titles now across three platforms may well give it some edge in the market, which – arguably – all the single parts urgently needed.
The move shows an impressively stringent move on the part of Oberon into building a casual-games-focussed powerhouse that extends its strengths across the three main consumer screens of today, i.e. the computer, the TV and the mobile phone.
Finally… I-Play and Oberon today announced that the former would be acquired by the latter, allegedly for $110-120m. A deal involving I-Play had been rumoured to happen for quite some time, so good for Gosen and his team that they found a suitor. And not a bad one either: Oberon is an online gaming powerhouse, so a move across to mobile makes sense (and they had probably realised that their acquisition of Blaze (which itself was the combination of Synergenix and Kayak Interactive) last year wasn’t getting them anywhere close to where they need to be). I-Play with its CEO David Gosen certainly showed stamina. They published some pretty cool titles (including Gamevil’s critically acclaimed “Skipping Stone” and hit series “The Fast & The Furious”) and in spite of oft rumoured shortage of cash just hung in there.
Oberon also raised some fresh money from investors Goldman Sachs, Oak Investments and Lehman Brothers, so all looks good for them, I suppose.
UPDATE: Today (12 Sept 2007) I-Play announced 11 new games all drawn from Oberon’s back catalogue. They are Hexic and Mozaki Blocks (apparently from the creator of Tetris), Flowerz, Slinky, Fish Tycoon, Spin & Win, Bricks of Egypt, Bricks of Atlantis, Magic Match, Bubble Town and Saints & Sinners Bingo. It will be interesting to see what will win in the current battle of big brands and casual games; both are frequently cited as two of the key components of breaking into the mass market.