In Part 2 of the Connect2Media sponsored series, 'Hotrod' talks about the transition from Java to native, and how operators are coping with it.
There can't be too many people with more experience of the mobile games space than Neil Holroyd. If you've been around the operator space in the UK for any significant time, you'll know 'Hotrod'. He was there in the early days of Java as a games manager at T-Mobile, then switched to a similar role with Orange.
Now, he's risen further to become senior product manager of new partner products/ commercial development at Everything Everywhere. So in a way he's working for both of his former employers at the same time; Everything Everywhere runs Orange and T-Mobile, and has 28 million customer and 720 stores in the UK.
He's seen a few changes. And he reflects on them here...
The business is bigger these days, but not necessarily in terms of operator resources. How much has changed?
Well, there were five of us just in the games department at Orange, and 20 overall. Now, with Everything Everywhere, which represents T-Mobile and Orange, there are 12 of us.
Article continues belowAdvertisement
But it's not just about numbers. The way we work is very different now in terms of submissions and testing and so on. It's all online, so it means there's less of the face to face stuff that there used to be in the early days. Our process is called Orange Partner Connect. It lets partners submit to a database, and have their products checked and then sent to the different member countries for distribution. And it means anyone can have a direct agreement with us. It's why we have 170 regional developers working with us now. They love having the chance to work direct with a big operator.
Overall, we're focused on optimised retail windows and better merchandising tactics to understand the needs of a consumer better. It is with this type of approach that operators still have a role to play. Knowing your customer is under 25, loves social networking and lives on a budget means we know what apps to serve as opposed to someone over 35 and has different needs.
Is there still a Java market for games?
Yes, but the market is likely to decline as we’ve seen already, and the focus is to optimise the porting efforts for those devices where we’re seeing a return on the production costs. Even now, there are millions of customers using phones with proprietary operating systems. Two of the top ten devices for content downloads at Everything Everywhere are Java – the Orange Rio and the Sony Ericsson W595. Our challenge is to address the right phones because there are so many of them.
So how do you address the native gaming market when games are clearly not coming to your portal to find them?
By partnering to provide our customers with a trusty recommendation area – as we’ve launched with Windows Phone 7 on Orange with a direct billing option. It gives customers an easy option to pay and also an easy discovery process. This has helped us open our doors further to more developers, who can use our tools and channels to promote their apps among our audiences.
How do you drive traffic to these channels?
We pre-install our own Android devices with a link to 'top apps' and that takes the user to our channel of Android Market. There are tens of thousands of apps on there, but we have a featured apps area that we update all the time.
The thing is, some of the OEM stores don't offer much flexibility, so having our own channels let's us do things like 'buy ten, get five free' which you couldn't do on Android Market for example. And the platform also means consumers aren't displayed any products they've already bought.
And on the Microsoft store we can do similar things like offer discounts that only our customers can see; everyone else gets the full price offer. We recently did a free app a day for a month that was again exclusive to our customers, with the WinPho stores using the SIM to identify them. That introduced us to 31 new indie developers. It was really important stuff for us, and we're looking to extend it to other stores.
Which of these kinds of retail offers work best for you?
We’ve tried a number of models. There is no one answer for the market. We currently support ‘One-off purchase; in-app purchase; rental; try before you buy; free; subscription; licensing where offered in priceplans among others.
We like rentals. They seem to be most successful in terms of conversion to a full priced sale.
How do you engage with iPhone users when you are locked out of the App Store channel?
Actually, I'd say we're more active on iPhone than any other operator, through our own apps. We have 20 of them on the App Store for our own services such as Orange Wednesday, Contacts Back-Up and Your Orange. We've even developed our own games like MyStar, which was made by Mobile Pie and Orange Labs. It uses Orange APIs s that the characters inside the game can email, text or voice call the player. It's a pretty interesting move for an operator, and we had a great response to it.
Ultimately how are games viewed strategically by Everything Everywhere?
It all comes back to data. We see games and other content as important drivers of data tariffs. That's why we have last April we started bundling multimedia products in with the data plan, offering two free games a month, and making media core to that side of our business.
Add a new comment
You need to be logged in to post comments. If you do not have an account then please register.
Comments
0 comments
There are no comments yet, be the first to add one!