What's happening over the channel? A panel explains.
A group of French mobile games companies took the stage at Mobile Games Forum in London this morning, showcasing their services and titles. ME was there to check them out.
Voxler is a company devoted to "vocal interaction within games", founded in 2005. It's just started supporting iPhone - and will be used in the next version of the iPint application.
The company's C++ SDK basically helps developers to use the iPhone microphone as an input for game controls. It has a singing game engine, and a speech recognition tech that can be used for vocal commands in, for example, puzzle and quiz games, as well as DS Zelda-style blowing commands.
Bulky Pix was next up. The company was set up in 2008 from the ashes of Vivendi Games Mobile, which is making iPhone and Facebook games, with PSP on the way in 2010. It released 10 games last year, with 30 on its roadmap for this year.
The company mixes self-publishing and work-for-hire, while also looking to publish games by other independent developers. It's also diversifying into apps to complement its gaming activities.
"We are only taking 10% of the revenues to publish your game," said boss Vincent Dondaine, addressing other developers. And he announced that Bulky Pix is working on an iPhone conversion of DS game.Maestro Jump In Music.
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Ave!Comics was next, a startup focused on mobilising comics - it supports iPhone, BlackBerry and Android, as well as PC, and has developed stores and readers for Facebook too, to boost viral marketing of its content partners.
The company is working with Nickelodeon for a project for the biggest comic festival in Europe - it's doing a TV show every day from the event, with viewers able to then download the comics on their mobiles or computers.
The company is looking for partnerships with game publishers and operators.
Medigames Studios was the final startup - it's working on games with a medical theme. For example, it has a game called Virtual Patient, which requires actual medical knowledge on the part of the player, to diagnose a patient. So these are 'serious' games, used for training.
However, it has more consumer-focused games too - one iPhone game called SOS - Save Our Souls for example.
