Mobile Entertainment

There’s a familiar pattern on the road to the big time: early success before a difficult period leading to rebirth and finally mainstream acceptance.

Take the rock band Genesis. They spent most of the 1970s toiling down an introspective prog-rock cul-de-sac before they ditched Peter Gabriel, embraced the sublime talents of Phil Collins, and threw themselves whole heartedly into the arena of stadium rock and sold millions of CDs.

Some would argue that the mobile games industry is due its own Phil Collins moment. Various industry leaders have commented on the need for a fresh approach in order to grow the market beyond its stubborn five per cent ceiling. At the GDC show this year Gameloft’s CEO Michele Guillemot said various roadblocks meant the market wasn't reaching its full market potential.

Probably the biggest headache for publishers is the operator portal. After the initial successes this is now a very narrow and difficult target to aim for. As a result many publishers and developers are looking to spread their wings across other platforms. Put simply mobile technology has evolved to the point where it’s not such a leap to other, more established gaming platforms.

Take Finland’s Rovio, for example. The company has a long track record in mobile, having developed and self-published survival horror games like The Darkest Fear, before operator rationalisation led it down a work for hire route. The last 12 months have seen Rovio develop titles such as first-party next-gen N-Gage game Bounce for Nokia.

But parallel to all that Rovio has honed its in-house tools to the point where it can take a reference Java build of a game and export it to work on any number of platforms, starting with Flash. The aim is to use web gaming communities to incubate Rovio’s original IP so that it can then take the game to an operator complete with an existing fan base and ‘marketing story’.

“The goal is to get a game into the top ten rankings on the big casual web game sites so we can then approach operators with an original title that already has five million users,” explains Rovio CEO Johan Annamatz. “The web game is essentially a marketing tool for the mobile version. Most big publishers use mobile as a marketing tool for their console games, but the audience is totally different.”

The first Rovio game to go down this route is puzzler Totomi, which will debut on the web this month in advance of a September release on mobile platforms.

In fact there’s a groundswell of opinion among some publishers and developers that the way to both grow their own business and the mobile games market in general is through a multi-platform approach. The wider games industry is awash with talk of how to attract the casual gamer and who knows more about that than the mobile guys?

Rovio is ultimately eyeing Nintendo DS, Wii Ware and Xbox Live Arcade as distribution channels for its games. It’s far from the only one. Elsewhere, Eidos New Media mobile studio Morpheme is pushing its Off The Wrist web game portal, RealArcade is cross-fertilising its online and mobile audiences, Gameloft is already publishing games for Nentendo DS and last month HandyGames confirmed it would be doing the same.

Many eyes will also be on Oberon Media. The online games specialist declared its intentions in the wireless space 12 months ago with the purchase of major UK publisher I-play. Since then, the trade has waited for the group to exploit the ‘synergies’ between web and mobile. Its SVP of publishing Don Ryan says the company is now preparing to fully realise its cross platform ambitions.

“There’s a broader opportunity in mobile and we’re trying to change the game,” says Ryan. “Put simply, the casual side of the market is being underserved because of the operator deck bottleneck. There’s untapped demand, particularly among women, who are right in the sweet sport for our established online games portals.”

Oberon has already begun cross-marketing its mobile games on the web game portals it manages for the likes of Comcast and MSN, while making its recent release Bubble Town available to play on Facebook.

Ryan continues: “Of course we want to strike deals with the major operators based on our expertise as an established games publisher and service provider, but where we can’t do that we’ll push users to mobile through our own web channels. The casual web game audience will buy into mobile if the process is made easy for them.”

This drift represents an unexpected reversal of direction for the mobile games sector. Think about it: for the last ten years console and PC publishers have been licensing their brands to their mobile counterparts. That, or opening their own wireless units and doing it themselves. Now, the products are going the other way.

However, what we’d really like to see is a mainstream mobile hit that prompts a bidding war mong ‘traditional’ games publishers. Might have to wait a while for that one.