GDC08: Gameloft's Guillemot discusses mobile industry hang-ups
In the opening keynote of the Game Developers Conference mobile component (being the section dedicated to gaming on cell phones, not some wheeled stage rolling down the hills of San Francisco), Gameloft president and CEO Michel Guillemot tackled supposed "myths" surrounding the mobile gaming sector, drawing attention to several issues currently inhibiting the industry's growth. "It's not the stagnant, tiny market that some people predicted it to be," he noted in his "Fast Life, Fast Media" presentation. He insisted that the perceived slowdown in the market was only temporary and not too dissimilar from that seen in the rest of the industry towards the end of a console cycle.
With various handsets expected to be in the hands of 4 billion people by 2010, one of the market's primary challenges lies in distribution through the multitudes of mobile carriers. Problems listed by Guillemot include non-standardized data costs across various characters (i.e. how much does it cost to transfer the data to your phone?), as well as the sheer number of SKUs that accompany each game release. If Gameloft produces 5 games per month, with compatible versions for 1,000 handsets in 10 different languages, it ultimately releases 50,000 different SKUs.
Despite the considerably quantity of releases, Guillemot insisted that quality must be uniform across all SKUs -- "as perfect as possible," because a consumer is unlikely to try the same game on different handsets. The iPhone was singled out as a handset that, at least in its current form, actually has a negative impact on the mobile gaming industry. Since the phone doesn't support any games yet, Guillemot considers every additional iPhone consumer to be a loss in the mobile gaming audience as a whole. Still, he predicts that touch-screen gaming, coupled with advanced handsets and the standardization of distribution costs, will lead to a new growth spurt for the mobile gaming industry in the latter half of 2008.
