Internet giant Yahoo! has ruled out the funding of large third party mobile games as it continues to extend its PC-based community and multiplayer services into the wireless space.
While Yahoo! already publishes internally produced mobile titles for its multi-platform connected games service, the company sees itself more as a connected gaming enabler where third parties are concerned.As such, Yahoo! is looking to attract mobile developers to its service by offering a revenue share in the region of 50:50 (reflecting terms already on offer to its web game developer partners), extensive technical support and economies of scale.
Speaking at the Game Developers Conference Europe in London, Yahoo!s director of games operations John Cahill said the company is hoping to grab a slice of a mobile games market it expects to be worth $7 billion by 2008.
The company is already one of the largest online game providers in the world, with users predominantly in the casual gamer demographic racking up three billion minutes in game sessions each month.
Yahoo! began its mobile game operations six months ago in the US and has so far released six games (including distribution with Sprint Nextel), but is now looking to ramp its portfolio ahead of launches in Europe and Asia Pacific during the next six months.
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Cahill said the key to Yahoo!s platform is that it in theory allows for games to be written once and played on the PC, mobile phone or even set-top box, supporting universal player log-ins, chat and avatars.
The cost of mobile game development has increased five fold in the last three years. We stress that if a developer is ploughing a six-figure sum into a mobile game they should take the time to create a web version too [in order to maximise ROI].
Cahill revealed Yahoo! is enjoying very good conversion rates for mobile versions of its most popular web games. The company is preparing a later-than-expected mobile SKU of its flagship poker game, which regularly attracts 5,000-10,000 simultaneous players via the web.
Yahoos mobile games ambitions set up a potentially interesting clash with Electronic Arts, which is in the process of taking its pogo.com suite of casual games to mobile, not to mention rival Internet behemoths AOL and Google.
