Making Games for Fun and Profit: Interview with Cellufun

One of the newer companies that’s making a splash in the mobile gaming scene is Cellufun. Founded in 2005 by three men, Arthur Goikhman, Stave Dacek and Cary Torkelson, Cellufun has managed to up their download from 300 a day to 20,000. So, with their current funding and a world of possibilities, where are they going now? I sat down with Arthur Goikhman to talk about their current operations and current plans.

Where it all began

Arthur Goikhman: Cellufun started in 2005 on the wings of an effort from one of the three founders(Cary Torkelson) who had a small mobile game publishing company, and, in general, has a deep gaming background and was attracted to the mobile platform. He created several best-selling games, but realized that a small publisher couldn’t really make money at it. So he came to me and Steve Dacek, the other partner, and said that there has to be a way to make money doing this but not in the traditional royalty-based way. What we created is a mobile community that is centered around gaming and games we create. So, we’re a portal, but we’re not a portal in the sense that we’re a store. You can’t get third-party content from us. You’re getting our content, whether they’re downloadable or browser-based. The games are all interconnected, whether it’s trophies, cross-game tournaments or a variety of ways to try to build the community.

The Advantages of DIY

A.G.: As you know, the mobile market is a disaster for downloadable games in terms of the amount of phones you have to support. This is a disaster for the manufacturers, when you look at it, a lot of the games only run on a few platforms or become very expensive to support. When you look at us, we have our own kernel that allows us to run on more than 600 phones for portable games out of one build. That’s a huge cost saving in terms of the typical industry figure, even if you’re working with an outsourcing team, it’s still costing you anywhere between $200 and $1000 to have a game ported to a target model. As you can imagine, if you have a target of supporting several hundred handsets, it can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, to have a major title available. Whereas we put out a title a month on a very meager budget prior to the funding stage.

Where the Money Comes From

A.G.: So there are some unique technological solutions. We have our own kernel that supports multiple platforms, multiplayer engine and in-game advertising engine that supports both ads on the WAP portal and in-game placement ads. Really, it’s much more sophisticated that anything you may see in a company like Greystripe. What we’re doing on a casual basic is more like what Massive is doing with the Xbox. The example I like to give is if we have a mobile pet dog game, and Purina is buying ads, then the dog can be eating Purina today and Alpo tomorrow, or a racing game could be Ford today and GM tomorrow.

So we have the ability to deliver real time motion sprites into the game using our multiplayer engine to deliver objects for game play or for ads. Prior to funding we came up with 7 downloadable games and probably a dozen various WAP games, all casual stuff that people know how to play already and make the community grow. At the same time, we have the capability to make much more sophisticated real-time arcade action games, for instance the Battle for Orion’s Belt that you can actually play other people over the net in real time. So we have a variety of capabilities, and have obviously been growing the portal in order to get more advertisers to us and build the community. To give you a sense, the first game was out in October of 2005, Sodoku, and was getting about 300 downloads a day. Typically, now, we have about 20,000 downloads a day. In a rough order of magnitude, over 7 titles, we deliver as many games a day as a major carrier. It turns out that free mobile games are a great carrot, and people find us and download the games.

Reaching Out

A.G.: Our advertising budget was very minimal things prior to funding, but obviously, now, we’ll be in a significant campaign now. One of the things we’re going to look at that’s very interesting to us both on an advertising basis as well as a press coverage basis is specialty magazines. Chess is the simplest example, in the US and worldwide, hundreds of thousands of people play. Having a version that you can play on your phone and play against your buddy on the phone while pretending to check in is very interesting to people. We need more exposure directly to the communities that are interested, we don’t have to educate them, or take a large hollywood movie and shove into the footprint for a mobile game, making it unplayable. Our plans are to market more and expanding the US audience, right now only 10-15% is from the US which is typical of mobile companies.

In terms of mobile traffic, in terms of WAP, in March we’re supposed to hit 15 million pageviews from the WAP site alone. Of course, 10-15% is US, and the rest is worldwide. It’s a significant WAP site.

The Breakdown

A.G.: India and South Africa followed by the U.K. It’s actually very evenly spread. The way most of the stuff has happened has been in surges. One day we’ll notice a major surge from Blackberrys and it was from someone playing chess and then posting it on a forum. It’s more like people spreading the word and not from invitations. We’re trying to add SMS invitations to games, which is quite an expensive proposition, but it should be fantastic for growing the community.

What’s Next?

A.G.: We have a very interesting roadmap for the games we’re developing. We’re developing a game called fighting words, for now, and it’s going to be a boxing game which features various candidates in the US presidential campaign and it can either be first person or it can use poll data that will impact strength. If someone is more popular in the polls, they’re harder to beat up. We want to get this out to the different interest groups in the US so they can create poll data from it as well, and it can be an interesting fund-raising vehicle for them and bring us advertising revenue. Something that would be an interesting game itself, but not a full-blown ad game. We’ve been trying to be careful about that, and it seems to be working out for us.

 

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