Talking connected mobile gaming with Namco Networks

Connected mobile gaming is kicking off in a significant way in the US, but it's not the real-time multiplayer that lots of people (especially industry conference organisers) thought would be big a few years ago.

Some stats for you. Vivendi Games Mobile has sold more than 7.5 million episodic downloads to players of its Surviving High School franchise. Hands-On Mobile has sold more than a million copies of Guitar Hero III Mobile and is offering new songs to download every month.

Meanwhile, 100,000 comic strips have been downloaded by the players of Popeye as rewards for doing well in the game, while players of two Scene It? mobile games have downloaded 17 million trivia questions.

Those latter two games are the work of Namco Networks, the US mobile gaming subsidiary of Namco Bandai. It just goes to show that there's more to the publisher than Pac-Man and other retro titles.

"We've had a lot of positive feedback from customers and carriers about these features," says VP of strategy and planning Jason Ford. "It's part of our strategy to keep those games on people's phones, although I can't share how those features change the average number of months someone keeps a game."

That stat would be interesting, since these games are often sold using monthly subscription pricing, meaning that every extra month a player keeps the game means more revenue for Namco Networks and its operator partners – and presumably enough revenue to cover the costs of producing and supporting these content downloads.

It remains to be seen whether these innovations will come to Europe. Ford says Namco Networks is working more closely with its European equivalent, Namco Bandai Networks Europe, and that the two publishers' release schedules will share more titles in the future.

But of course, the stumbling block on this side of the Atlantic may be the availability of subscription-based billing or micropayments, not to mention the wider availability of flat-rate or at least affordable data plans.

Back in the US, though, Namco Networks is certainly punching its weight, despite ongoing consolidation on the part of the operators, and who they'll work with. Is a company like Namco able to compete with the so-called Big Three (EA, Gameloft and Glu)?

"Depending on the source, we can sometimes be considered one of those big three," says Ford. "We are extremely competitive, and consider ourselves to be part of that upper echelon."

Recent research from M:Metrics, revealed at the BREW 2008 show, partially bears him out. They claim that in April 2008, Namco Networks secured 8% of premium deck slots in the US, level with Glu (8%) and not far behind Gameloft (11%).

In terms of actual purchases, M:Metrics says there's more of a gap, however, with EA accounting for 26.5%, Glu 14%, Gameloft 11.8%, and then Namco in fourth place with 4.5%.

One thing Ford doesn't do is complain about the state of the US mobile games market, in contrast to the downbeat mood amongst some other publishers.

"We're lucky in that we're not backed by VCs, and while we're public in a sense, that rolls up into a Japanese public company, which isn't quite the same situation as the public companies like EA, Gameloft and Glu," he says.

In other words, Ford says Namco's view of the market isn't clouded by the need to find excuses for a lack of growth to mollify impatient VCs or investors, who were expecting big numbers.

"We don't do a great deal of finger pointing," he says. "It's always easiest to blame somebody else for problems. We have a responsibility as publishers for this industry, and carriers have theirs. We still enjoy working with them."

Ford, of course, used to be the games manager at US carrier Sprint, so has seen life on the other side of the carrier-publisher divide. Namco Networks has been pro-active in working with operators, such as its recent sweepstakes with Alltel Wireless.

What next, though? Another clear strategy for Namco has been to explore new mobile gaming platforms, particularly the iPod with its retro games, including a platform-exclusive title in Pole Position Remix, which inserts the album art stored on a player's iPod into the game as billboards.

"That might not be a big, sweeping change, but it's something we feel is a great touch to make a game fun and creative," says Ford. "People forget about the whole buzz aspect of this stuff – 20 per cent of folks get recommendations on games from friends. We want to make many evangelists out of the people who play our games."

Does that evangelism stretch to Apple's newest mobile games platform, the iPhone? You'd have to assume so, but Ford is staying tight-lipped for now.

"We don't have anything to publicly share at this point," he says. "But part of my job is to get partners lined up, and there are platforms people approach us for, because of our classic heritage, and because they know our quality from the mobile space. Put it this way: we're staying on top of those new platforms, just like we were a launch partner for the iPod."