Namco Part 2: The Good, the Bad, and the Branded

Here’s part two of QuicklyBored’s interview with Jason Ford, late of Sprint…he’s joined by Scott Rubin, Namco’s VP of Marketing. They both seem to think that one problem with the mobile gaming market is that it’s young — they point out that other gaming markets took 15 years or more to develop. Jason is also drilled on his whole “brands are bad, m’kay” stance now that he’s working at Namco, which pretty much exclusively does mobile games of its famous brands. He gives a good answer, but I think it could be extended. When people talk about “branded games” they normally mean mobile games that are branded with something other than a game — such as a movie or random famous person. So the problem with these brand deals that they don’t naturally lead to a game style or concept, the licenses normally cost a fortune and the game developers often have a very short time to develop the mobile, leading to an almost inevitable loss of quality (I should point out that the two games I’ve linked to are quite good). With Namco’s brands these problems don’t exist — the Pac Man brand naturally leads to a very obvious style of play, Namco owns the licenses so they are free and it doesn’t have any artificial time constraints, so it can keep perfecting a game until it is good. Besides, their games already work well on mobiles.
Jason mentions a pitch he heard while at Sprint for a Rice-a-Roni football game — which isn’t a mobile game it’s an ad.

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