Niccolo de Masi on the mobile games publisher's next move.
Glu Mobile is certainly persistent. It was once one of the biggest mobile games publishers in the world, armed with a stable of brand licences.
Then it fell from grace, missing the iPhone-fuelled boom in smartphone gaming, and then suffering from financial woes that hindered its ability to catch up on the App Store.
However, the publisher hasn't thrown in the towel just yet. In the last week, Glu has secured $13.5 million of new financing from its investors, and unveiled four new games that it hopes will return it to the big time.
Persistent is the right word too: Glu CEO Niccolo de Masi has rebuilt the company around the idea of 'persistent' social games, with a freemium model designed to attract communities of players, and revenues from in-app payments and advertising.
"Glu has really been through everything it needs to take its historic strengths and make them into hugely important future assets," says de Masi, of the company's restructuring.
"The team is built out, the balance sheet has been repaired, and we have plenty of financial strength to grow as aggressively as we'd like to in the next couple of years, and bring our vision of mobile social gaming to consumers."
Part of that involves making sure its new games work on more handsets than just the iPhone. "Your game can't be very social or viral if you can't invite your friends to play against you," says de Masi.
Glu's shift to a freemium model means its biggest rival - in the App Store at least - will be ngmoco, with Zynga hovering menacingly in the wings.
By targeting Android, Windows Phone 7 and other platforms, Glu is looking to get an early advantage over those rivals, and make use of its porting experience from the J2ME / BREW days.
"We think we're positioned very nicely," says de Masi. "We're platform-agnostic, and we'll find whatever the most efficient monetisation vehicle is. We want to be the first company that produces mobile-only titles that do more than $10 million of revenue, and become brands that the man on the street knows."
Evidence of the strategic change came in the company's Q2 results, when Glu revealed that revenues from in-app payments and advertising had increased by 127% during Q2.
However, that was around $304,000, based on Glu's claim that in-app payments and ads accounted for a 16% share of the publisher's $1.9 million of smartphone revenues.
Glu hopes new games like Magic Life and Gun Bros will help fuel that growth in the coming quarters, along with a dash of its past in branded games like Lord of the Rings: Middle-Earth Defense.
What about Zynga though? One of the soundbites that's been dropped by de Masi recently is Glu's ambition to be 'the Zynga of mobile' - yet presumably the actual Zynga has that ambition too, and much more money to do it with.
Pressed on this, de Masi talks more generally about big social gaming firms.
"I see a lot of them going to one platform, taking their biggest titles to the iPhone," he says.
"And while some will take Farmville maybe to another platform, they will start to find this landscape more and more challenging as the smartphone manufacturers continue to put out differing [phone] models."
So fragmentation will stop Zynga being as dominant a presence on smartphones as it is on Facebook?
"Zynga is an impressive company in terms of their size and execution, and they'll be a fierce competitor on mobile. But they will find it more challenging to negotiate the mobile ecosystem," he says.
"You can reach 500 million people on Facebook, but you can't do that on mobile without going cross-platform. That's Glu's strength."
However, going cross-platform from smartphones to Facebook and other digital stores like Xbox Live Arcade is down Glu's priority list at present.
de Masi admits it would be great to "get on everything" whenever a game is launched, but presumably prudence dictates that Glu is targeting smartphones first with its new persistent titles.
That said, he also thinks that Glu's games will be making their way into the living room through existing partnerships.
"I wouldn't be surprised if in the next year, Microsoft, Apple and Google continue to strengthen the opportunities for our digital app stores to make it into the living room," he says, citing Apple TV and Google TV as prime examples, along with the existing Xbox Live Arcade.
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