I had a chat with EA Mobile about their new line up of games, which the company hopes will extend EA’s market beyond its stronghold of North America and into Europe and Asia as well. While EA Mobile still has a massive portion of the US market it doesn’t dominate anywhere else, and the company is keen to change that. “Visibility in Europe has been increasing dramatically,” Adam Schwenk, Producer of Medal of Honor, told me. “We’re focusing on some other territories now that we have the big mothership of EA providing resources.” The plan is to take things worldwide, and launch games like Medal of Honor in the US and elsewhere almost simultaneously. Games like Fight Night have characters from around the world in a bid to extend the appeal. Of course, while it’s doing this companies like Gameloft are targeting EA Mobile’s position in the US market…
I’ve only tried one game — Medal of Honor — which worked pretty well, despite being the standard left-to-right arcade action game. It’s got some interesting features, including sniper mode and dynamic lighting, but the interesting part is how the company is taking EA’s big console brands into the mobile platform, where they want to target casual gamers who may not have played the console title.
The games (well, Medal of Honor, and while EA said that not all games would follow this model, it sounds like this will be the focus) are designed so you start playing when you press start, without the need to read instructions first. The instructions pop-up the first time you attempt to do something. Which is all fine and well for introducing people to the brands, but EA’s core customer base isn’t going to like it as much. “We wanted it to appeal to our core audience as well,” said Schwenk. “So the depth of play is how well you get through the level, how quickly, you can redo the level.”
Other games are the same — boxing game Fight Night Round 3 has a quick fight mode and a career mode for “in-depth”, with that being achieved by creating your own customized boxer. There are also two types of control, one-thumb and two-hands. Likewise the NBA Live 07 is designed for simplicity. “We focused on realism, and making it very user friendly, to get the user into the game within the first 30 secs,” said Andre Leighton, Producer of the game. “We understand that time is valuable for users playing mobile. Get the user into the game very quickly.” For this game the depth came by putting in every player and every team in the NBA — making the game about 2.5 Mb in size.
There’s been a lot of criticism thrown at the concept of taking console games and making them fit for mobile. The general issue raised is that mobile can’t handle the console gameplay yet (despite being able to get PS1 quality graphics), so the fans of the console game will be disappointed while other people won’t be drawn in by the brand. If it’s done very well though, console fans will be happy with it and new people will be drawn to the game, potentially buying the console version, which is obviously what EAMobile is going for. Whether they’ve succeeded or not I leave for the market to decide.
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post