Part two of our interview with Jill Braff, covering Glu's move into social games.
For the first part of the interview, covering iPhone, Android and Glu's executive reshuffle in Europe, click here.
Perhaps the most intriguing development in Glu’s reinvention of itself is its upcoming push into the social gaming arena.
“Increasingly we see the lines blurring between mobile and online,” says SVP of global publishing Jill Braff. “We recognise there's a connected consumer relationship emerging, which is new for Glu but also new for the mobile industry.”
What does this mean in practice? Facebook games. Glu has been on a recruitment drive for social gaming talent, with the first fruits already available in beta: Bonsai Blast and My Hangman.
Both are based on existing mobile games, and neither has been heavily promoted so far, but they represent Glu’s first steps onto Facebook, with redesigned game mechanics to take advantage of the social aspects of the platform.
“We've undergone quite a bit of work to retool our engineering and bring new DNA into the company,” says Braff.
“We've brought in a Facebook team here in the US, with our VP of social gaming Scott Derringer joining from Zynga, and an engineering team that comes out of the social gaming world. We recognised we need to bring in the right sort of talent, so we can make standalone positive Facebook experiences, much more in the vein of what we’ve seen from the Playdoms and Zyngas of the world.”
Playfish rivalry
This move is logical enough, although it’s perhaps ironic that it’s taken Glu this long to make its leap into social gaming. The publisher’s EMEA boss before Keeling, Kristian Segerstrale, left the company to set up Playfish, which is now one of the biggest companies in the social gaming sector, and one of the yardsticks against which Glu will have to measure itself.
Braff’s views on how Facebook will alter Glu’s games philosophy certainly chimes with what Segerstrale has been saying at Playfish: the idea of games as a service rather than a one-time product.
“The product may go live, and it's only the beginning of the experience,” she says. “We're getting feedback from our customers, looking at reviews, following the Twitter feedback, and then improving our games and changing our marketing according to what consumers are telling us.”
While Glu’s first two Facebook games are conversions of existing mobile titles, Braff says the publisher may well launch Facebook-only games – and that one title is currently in development that fits the bill, with no mobile release planned.
However, she also says that successful Facebook games may well be brought back to iPhone and the carrier decks too.
PSP Minis and DSiWare
What about other digital gaming platforms, like PSP Minis or DSiWare? “We have nothing to announce right now, but we’re definitely… well, as platforms become digital, they become more in our wheelhouse,” she says. “We are definitely looking into ways that we can extend as a result.”
With its costs seemingly under control, Glu’s move to become a cross-platform publisher with more focus on social features will certainly be interesting to watch. It’s a sign of how quickly the market has changed, and how companies which were built around the carrier-dominated ecosystem are having to adapt.
“For the past number of years, our world has been about creating a game, and then our competitive advantage was very inexpensively porting that game to thousands of handsets, and then shippng it to carriers around the world, with day-and-date marketing,” says Braff.
“That's still key to our business, but it's now much more organic too.”
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