Tips from a mobile publisher

Next up, my notes from this afternoon's session from the Nice Man From THQ. Quite a tidy set of tips if you're thinking of entering the hell fray that is developing for zillions of handsets.

THE NEXT GENERATION OF MOBILE ENTERTAINMENT
Tim Walsh, THQ Wireless

Quarter over quarter we’re seeing triple growth. This is a great business. So what now? As developers, you should be asking yourselves this, what are we going to do now, and where are we taking this business?

• 2003: There were 96 m data enabled handsets worldwide
• 2004: 460 million
• 2007: 800 million estimated

… and as far as I know there aren’t 100m Playstations worldwide yet.

The tech is advancing at lightening speed. It was only a few years back it was all text-based WAP, and now it’s streaming movies...

So let's go over the system, and how it works.

The developer/publisher relationship:
Developers can go to market directly, work internally with a publisher or sell direct to the operators. Why work with a wireless publisher? Why have that person in the mix? I'll sum it up as:
Brands, Distribution, Marketing, Development support, Porting and localisation..

Brands drive growth. You can create applications based on a publisher’s brand (e.g. NBA, NFL, etc, rights already reside with publishers there). We can do like half a dozen applications based on basketball in a season, for instance. Brands are important to us because the wireless users are the mass market. Half the users are female. It’s got to both young and old. Half these people already play games. They want to have the same experience interface with their favourite brands over the wireless network, like they already do with TV, film, etc.
Know your mass market mobile consumer:

• Tweener and preschool: the mobile pacifier. Give mom or dad’s phone to the kid to pass time.
• Teen: It’s a rite of passage. Time for experimentation. Getting your first mobile phone is a rite of passage in itself .. personalisation, customisation, reflecting you as an individual. It’s about Experiences.
• Young Adult: power users spending parental income. o Twenties: know gaming and want to continue gaming.
• Thirtysomethings: the loosely supervised executive with company phone.
• 40+: the grey gamer. Wants to be young, isn’t. Loves tech.

So publishers.. provide distribution outlets too, to the world of operators. It’s a global market. Develop locally, distribute globally. Two of the top three moble operators are Chinese. Vodaphone represents 18 countries now.

Marketing: we do that. Brand management. Managing the look the feel of that brand to the consumer, making sure it’s right. Advertising and promotion: not so much consumer advertising today, but the market is growing and there will be a tipping point in the future where wireless is the primary promotional to the consumer. Publicity: publications etc – we help organise and place publicity. Placement on the deck: cross-promotions, co-op marketing, making sure if there’s an event like a movie it’s based on, there’s coordinated marketing and dates are met..

Typical relationship:
Third Party development

• Developer works with publisher on concept and design
• Developer commits to approx 6 reference builds with different memory and tech issues, with portability in mind
• Ability to port at the source. This is absolutely key.
• Understanding of the marketplace: make games that need to be made.
• Do it on time. Timing is so important in this business. Events can’t be missed. Dates are key.

So the builds we like to see:

• BREW hi fi
• BREW lo fi
• J2ME hi fi
• J2ME lo fi
• J2ME Series 40.

This covers a core set of about 34 handsets [alice's note: I may have misheard this].

You must learn to conquer the industry challenges:
1. porting,
2. time to market,
3. quality experience.

If you can’t port in-house, work to a specification that allows the publisher to bring in a 3rd party to do the porting. Look for ways to create recurring revenue streams in your design .. updates and add-ons? Downloads and new levels? Multiplayer? Oh and did I say, be on time? This really improves your chances of getting a hit.

So what makes a good game?
Gameplay:
    Replayability
    Fun factor
    Controls – are they easy and intuitive?
Graphics:
    Every generation there is a significant growth in graphical capability
Sound:
    It’s very important!
Good reference builds:
    Portability
Delivery:
    On time.

It’s a hit-driven business. Here are some example revenues:
Take an "A" game title: You'll want 1m units downloaded. Net revenue to the publisher = $3.5M. Cost = $1-2m to publish (depending on license, multiplayer, distro, marketing, licensing). Can be very fruitful!
But with a B game title: 200-400K downloads. Makes $700 – 1.4m. Cost still $1-2m. Not so good! And a C game title: 50K downloads. $170m revenue. $1-2m. Like I said, it's a hit-driven industry.

If you’re a developer here, you’re in a great spot. There's a huge market opportunity out there!

Comments

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Alice

Nice commentary by Tim Walsh, but the stats quoted are hopelessly out of date. The picture is MUCH more BRIGHT for mobile phones/cellular phones and mobile data.

Deutsche Bank is one of the major institutions releasing a count of handsets by technology. Their Oct 29 2004 report has this count of data-enabled handsets (cumulative numbers) on so-called 2.5G and 3G technologies (GPRS, EDGE, W-CDMA, CDMA2000 1x, and CDMA2000 EV-DO):

2003 total shipped 234 M, world cumulative 320 M
2004 total shipped 383 M, world cumulative 703 M
2005 estimate ship 511 M, world cumulative 1.2 B

In other words by end of last year almost half of the global population of 1.6 cellular phones were already advanced data-enabled (of course over 90% of them can handle simple data like SMS text messaging, mobile commerce payments, data and news alerts, etc) and by the end of this year two thirds of the world's cellphones will be data-enabled.

By the way, I think Tim Walsh had some old data and he perhaps mistakenly thought the yearly shipped numbers were the global cumulative numbers. Yes, his numbers are incredibly impressive. Except that the truth is MUCH MORE remarkable..

If you thought this was a big market, think again. It is literally the world's biggest market. The most prevalent digital connection device on the globe is the mobile phone, EVERY economically viable person on the globe carried a mobile phone. By the end of 2005 more people will have access to the internet via a mobile phone than there are fixed internet access points. Already since 2003 there have been more people using SMS text messaging than use e-mail.

I discussed these trends already in my second book - the only business book on advanced mobile telecoms - m-Profits, which was a bestseller in 2003. My fourth book, Communities Dominate Brands, carries on these themes and explains very deeply the opportunities for developers among gamers, bloggers, mobile phone swarms, etc. See more about the book including excertps at the website for the book at www.futuretext.com.

Dominate !

Tomi Ahonen / HatRat :-)