Vivendi Launches Mobile Games Unit

VU Games LogoVivendi Universal Games has launched a new division, Vivendi Universal Games Mobile. It’s headed by Paul Maglione, fresh from a senior vp of publishing and marketing position at I-Play, and plans to launch mobile games based on the companies original games IP (which includes Warcraft, Empire Earth, Crash Bandicoot, Leisure Suit Larry and Diablo) as well as licence other content brands. So far the mobile division consists of Empire Earth Mobile and SWAT Force, but has plans to launch another dozen games in 2006. About 40% of the games are created by independent developers, the rest are created in house. VUGM will be releasing all games, from one-thumb casual gaming to high-end 3D shooters…”3-D seems to be growing faster than people anticipated because, as cell phone users trade up, their new handsets almost always have 3-D capabilities. So even if someone doesn’t particularly want 3-D, they get it,” said Maglione. And a lot of the VUG games involve deep, connected gameplay which can be made to work on mobile phones with a bit of effort. “Connectivity is at the heart of what cell phones are all about, and finding ways to make the games truly interactive has got to be part of the evolving technological innovations of mobile gaming…When you buy a console or PC game, you open the box, you slip the disc in, you read the manual, and you can be there for 20 minutes before you actually start playing. With a mobile game, you have to start having fun within a couple of seconds of firing up your phone.”
Maglione also made a couple of interesting predictions for the industry as a whole. He expects there to be more acquisitions — suggesting Glu, I-play, mForma and Digital Chocolate as possible targets. He also sees carriers changing the way they promote content, following the lead of Telefonica in Spain and TeliaSonera in Sweden. Instead of listing all the games in the carrier portal they make it more like a shopping mall, where each publisher has their own store. “The deck lists each publisher’s space within which the publisher determines which games are available and how they get promoted.” I think this might work better if the publishers have a third-party portal (which they probably will anyway) which has a link/icon on the carriers portal. This depends on the carriers business models, of course. One benefit with having the publisher “shop” on the carrier portal is that it can be searched — so if you’re looking to download Empire Earth you don’t have to remember who published it, you can just search for it. I’m not sure if this would work with a third-party portal…I think it could but I’m not sure.

Comments have been disabled for this post