A bit of background: Ionsquare Ltd is an IT consultancy for start-ups and spin off ventures with a strong focus on mobile software. We are primarily a business to business service company in that we don't sell directly to end users, but rather develop bespoke software for our clients. The mobile games market is a very interesting place to be at the moment because it is fragmented, yet has significant growth potential. Many titles are developed by hobbyist teams; some are developed by outsourcing teams for under 5000 USD per title and others have budgets of over 1 million USD. There are a number of big players such as Glu, Gameloft and others which have an established presence but are going more and more down the route of large game publishers of coming out with rehashes of the same types of games which rely heavily on the marketing pull of existing brands. At the same time, large publishers are moving in by buying up smaller players and applying their existing business model. Then there are a few companies which deal directly with device manufacturers and launch titles which work on a handful of devices and serve to showcase the hardware, rather than focusing on gameplay. What these companies are missing or maybe choosing to ignore is the fact that mobile devices offer access to a new user base of casual gamers, including girls and the older generation, who don't play console games and would only play on their mobile in short bursts of 30 seconds to 2 minutes at a time. For such gamers, even 8 USD may seem like too much to spend on a mobile game. However, due to the amount of administrative overhead and marketing costs associated with releasing a title it is difficult for these large companies to sell their games for less and turn a profit. This is something that small teams and hobbyists don't need to worry about. Smaller teams also tend to come up with innovative concepts which are likely to appeal to the casual gamer. However, they face a number of problems. They are: 1) the difficulty associated with developing for a number of different device groups and testing across these devices 2) getting the game out there and generating enough sales 3) collecting and distributing the profits across a number of different countries To address these problems, Ionsquare is considering creating a mobile content portal aimed at small teams and hobbyist developers. Ionsquare could provide: - A meeting point for developers and graphics designers - A J2ME SDK with build tools and framework for handling the wide range of devices and working around platform bugs - An up to date device database as well as a list of bugs - Before being released to the general public, games could be released in QA mode with users who have agreed to be testers reporting bugs in return for a free copy of the finished game (a rating system may be in place to ensure that poor quality testing is discouraged) - A system which will handle billing via reverse SMS / credit card - A fair showcasing mechanism whereby new/original titles are displayed more frequently to attract attention - Forwarding of comments on the games by the players directly to the developers - Ability for the developers themselves to determine the pricing of the titles, as well as a recommended price suggested by the testers - Regular payouts to developers for amounts less than 300 USD (which is the cut-off point for a lot of distributors) - Possibly additional advertising in newspapers, magazines and other media. Given sufficient resources, additional traffic to the site via affiliate marketing partners could also be generated. Because of the nature of the project, the PR buzz alone should create sufficient amounts of traffic. Also, given that enough developers link to the site, the increased page rank would help the portal come up on the first page of search results without having to resort to paid for advertisements. To summarize: the idea is to create a virtual corporation for developing and distributing mobile content. Has something like this been done before? Do you see any problems with this approach? Would you submit content to a portal like that? Are there any other features that you would want? Your comments and criticism would be greatly appreciated.

Hi all,

I was "hired" by this company a while ago, including an interview over the net, then was given an account on their site which was a message board, but only two people seem to actually work there, Oleg Podsechin, the programmer and Matti Jokihaara, the artist. Over the next few weeks/months I would periodicly log onto their IRC channel and have discussions with them for at least an hour or two at a time, but I never got any projects from them or parts of projects whatsoever. It was a huge waste of time. All the while I was always given "next week/month we'll have x/y/z" then when the time came, there was always some excuse. Again, huge waste of time and effort.

--Bart

Bart Jaszcz, good to hear from you. I'm sorry to hear you feel like you've been let down - I thought we were quite clear that none of the projects we discussed were going to go ahead until funding was confirmed. In my experience it takes a while to get things off the ground and only one in ten pitches is successful.

Given that we are a small (but not as small as only two people ;) service company with a very close relationship with our clients, getting someone who we hadn't met in person involved in a project with a paying client was far too risky a prospect. As a result we were hoping to eventually work with you on a share of revenue basis, but unfortunately you disappeared before we could take things further.

The proposition mentioned in the parent post in part stems from the discussions we had with you, so I was hoping you'd have some constructive comments on this.

Regards,
Oleg

Quote: Original post by Ionsquare Has something like this been done before?

getjar.com and handango.com

getjar is good for testing and distributing free content, handango can handle the paid content. The general problem with a site offering free and paid content is that most users will just go for the free content. Casual mobile games are especially difficult to persuade users to upgrade to paid content, since they already have their quick casual game fix. If you limit your free demo too much, or even to a level which you think is appropriate, chances are you will end up with bad user feedback from users wanting more for their free version. Other problems include having too many games (so please make the site searchable).

It is admirable that you are trying to address the problem. Personally I do not know what the solution is, it is a very difficult market to be in.

Oleg,

So how long was I supposed to check back with you about these projects? As I recall, I talked to you for well over a month, including my e-mail's and my visits to your channel. As to your comment about your close relationship with your clients and not wanting to involve people you haven't "met", what exactly did you want me to do there? Besides, your customers shouldn't care less who your employee's are, unless they run your company. Either way, when I stopped coming to your channel, I never heard from you again, so if you actually came up with something tangible, why didn't you contact me, you had my e-mail address.

--Bart