paramount – On Technology and the Future: Education, IoT, AI, Mobility, Games

They’re coming… The big entertainment players are increasingly gearing up to take charge of their mobile destinies. Whereas previously a lot of the big movie studios would simply license out the rights to mobile applications and games to independent game companies (Gameloft and Glu having been particularly active), they seem to increasingly embrace the medium themselves. Sony, Disney, Paramount – they have all recently been self-publishing on the – erm – iPhone. Other mobile platforms? The 98% non-iPhone handsets? Erm, maybe later…

Going a little further, Warner Brothers digital arm plans to release no fewer than 40 iPhone apps in 2009. And besides Warner properties like “Terminator Salvation”, it looks to doing on this platform what it has proven to be quite capable of in others, namely production and distribution. It therefore plans not only to publish Warner-related apps but wants to assert itself as a leading distributor of mobile apps full stop.

It banks on its might and star power claiming that developers would struggle to find Apple’s ear. And there is certainly truth in this as a major studio (with all the marketing muscle that comes with it, may well be of more appeal to Apple when it comes to accentuate the wild growth of its 30,000+ apps on the app store. The return of the old publishing model then?!

But, well, they all do it not on just any mobile but on the iPhone only (I hear you sigh…). So why only the iPhone? 1.x% market share and all? Well, it’s simple and it’s powerful: Warner mentioned that “it doesn’t cost a lot to launch an app”. And that is probably true for the iPhone (at least when you are used to movie budgets). However, it could not be less inaccurate for “classic” mobile: one needs all the carrier distribution agreements, battle handset fragmentation and ends up with a product that is inferior (apps and games on J2ME devices will often fail on the “smallest-common-denominator” rule and lack polish when compared to the iPhone) and much more expensive to produce. Hey, carriers and OEM: another call to simplify and unify your platforms!

Viacom’s Paramount announced to enter the sphere of video game publishing, and they want to concentrate on “casual, hand-held and mobile” because of the lower production cost compared to “proper” consoles. The latter would, it seems, remain reserved to sister company MTV, which recently entered the space with Rock Band, a title that sold a respectable 1.8m units since November 2007.

Paramount still seems to be looking around for the right models though: Sandi Isaacs, its SVP Interactive & Mobile said that they “are entering into deals now where we will be publishing games this year. There’s going to be a slate where in some cases we’re publishing, in some cases we’re co-publishing, or in others we’re funding development and another publisher buys it. It’s important for us to have a flexible model.” She also said that the studio might use external finance to fund video game development, which would be closer to business models widely applied in the film industry but which is still relatively nascent in games (although there are a select few project finance companies out there that also take on game development).

Irrespective of the relatively cloudy nature of the announcements, it is good to see that a major studio starts putting more emphasis on gaming as a way to capitalize on their IP besides (relatively speaking) shabby guarantees and advances for licensing their rights to others. For mobile, the most exciting bit may well be a co-publishing model: Paramount does not and – at least for a while – will not have the distribution footprint of many mobile publishers, so a partnership there might be mutually fruitful for both parties. Should this become a successful example, it might well help to break open the somewhat old-school business models that sometimes tend to strangle developers and publishers in the mobile space: they are required to cough up money that they would really require to put into game development, marketing, sales and promotions rather than contributing what is a relatively tiny percentage to a movie’s overall revenue. Encouraging!

Tag: paramount

Warner Brothers push into mobile!

Paramount gets game