@ CTIA: Audio Interview With Greg Ballard, CEO of Glu Mobile

Here is the interview with Glu CEO Greg Ballard that was promised earlier…Glu’s acquisition of iFone was some big news announced at CTIA, and that was naturally a main topic of my interview with Greg but we covered more general ground as well. The audio interview is linked to below — there’s a bit of background noise but a lot less than the interviews I did at CTIA (this was in the Hilton across the road). Glu bought iFone for its brand portfolio: “It gives us some of the most powerful brands in mobile phones today,” said Greg. We also talked about how it affected a possible acquisition of Glu, but Greg didn’t seem concerned either way…”For us it’s less about exit strategies and much more about building in the long run a company that has choices ahead of it.”
Greg anticipates a lot more acquisitions in the coming few years. “It’s inevitable that there’s going to be some [acquisitions]. Some of the large players who are not in the business will start coming into the business and they’ll do so by acquisition, but not every acquisition is going to be a good acquisition,” said Greg. “My guess is that three quarters of the acquisitions that we see going forward will not end up being particularly strategic, but will be borne out of a sense of concern that they have to do something.”
We also talked about branded games, and how tempting it was to make games for blockbuster releases because there is so much marketing done by the studios, and the off-portal conundrum. “It’s harder to get people to buy games offdeck today than ringtones or wallpapers,” said Greg. Glu works with off-portal distributors and is “optimistic” that the channels that will become available to consumers will make it easier for them to distinguish high quality titles from lesser quality ones…but it’s still a long way from maturity. “Having said that the vast majority of games are being sold through the carriers today, and we have chosen to put the bulk of our energies into working with the carriers to work out ways to increase the usability and the acceptability of the experience of buying off the deck. For example we recently launched a games sampler that allows people to sample a number of games and then choose from among those samples which ones they would like to buy. We would prefer to spend our technical and marketing efforts directed towards where 95% of the games are being sold, the carriers.”
mp3logo1.gifThe MP3 file is here (18 minutes, 4 MB) here
Or you can stream it here..click on the arrow:
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