No Game Competition Between Carriers — Jason Ford

Jason Ford has done a few interviews since moving from Sprint to Namco, possibly because the smaller company gives him more leeway and possibly because all the journalists want him to say something nasty about his former employer…but he insists the best way forward is to team up with the carriers.
However, he did have something very interesting to say about carriers and their attitude to cross-platform/device/carrier communities.

“There’s a little bit of a challenge, because some people feel like they’re competing when maybe they’re really not. Even though I had a lot of fun interacting with my peers at other carriers [while working at Sprint], I never really thought like I was competing with them directly because we weren’t using gaming as a primary acquisition or retention tool…”I look at it from the perspective of the old messaging days. There was a time when you could only text message other people on your carrier. When they opened it up and made it cross carrier, every carrier benefited because growth went through the roof.”

It’s an incredibly good point — as much as I like games and am keen for mobile gaming to succeed, the percentage of people who choose a carrier based on its mobile gaming service will always be so small as to be statistically insignificant. As such, carriers should not be at all competitive with their mobile game portals — in fact, they should make them as open and interoperable with other portals as possible. That will encourage people to use the service, and some people on their network will start an interactive game because one of their friends on another network convinced them to play with him — something that will only happen if the portals are interoperable.

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