Interview: Vivendi Games Mobile's CEO Paul Maglione

It's been quite a ride for Vivendi Games Mobile. Having only formed in March 2006, the publisher has already released nearly a dozen games over here in Europe, including some original titles.

With the release of Crash Boom Bang!, we grabbed CEO Paul Maglione to pick his brains on what Vivendi has planned for 2007, including new games, what trends he thinks will be hot in the mobile games industry, and whether the publisher is going to bring World Of Warcraft to phones in some shape or form.

The emphasis will be on ramping up our casual games representation. We'll have a few more one-button casual puzzle games than we did in 2006.

We're also bringing back some gems from the Sierra Classic Collection, including The Incredible Machine, which we feel will be quite a unique take on the brain-teaser category. Then we've got Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sale, which is a return to the origins of the franchise.

We've done a couple of Larry mobile games, but they weren't adventure games, and what people have really been asking us for is those original adventures, so we're coming out with that in June.

Certainly Crash always does well, and Spyro: The Beginning also did very well, which was a nice surprise for us. And then Eragon did well too, so those are the top three we launched last year.

This year we have high hopes for The Incredible Machine and a few other titles as well. We're further expanding our range of genres, including a dogfighting game [don't write in, readers, he means airplane combat], a life sim called Office Wars, and a really innovative puzze game called Chock Blocks, which is blocks-based, but has totally new gameplay.

It's something you need to do very carefully. The most pragmatic way to go about it is to start with what works on a mobile in terms of gameplay. So anything that requires too many button presses, or gets too complex without rewarding the player in a few seconds is a problem.

Something like Crash Boom Bang! was perfect for mobile, as it was already a mini-game format. Something like Caesar, which is more of a strategy game, needs more work on its controls, to make it easy to play on mobile. It's about stripping down the game without taking away its core fun strategy elements.

I think the subject matter has to be right. Action / adventure / fantasy films are a good subject matter for games, but there were a lot of mistakes in the past, such as publishers making games based on romantic comedies, which was a real stretch!

You have to be cautious, so we don't see ourselves doing more than a couple of movie licences a year, and you have to make sure the licensor in each case is really going to help you with marketing. Eragon was particularly effective because not only did the film come out at the same time, but there was the console and PC game as well, so it was totally cross-platform.

Cross-platform definitely will – I think you'll see people like ourselves, EA and THQ leading the way on that. I also think you'll see more casual games coming to Europe, and by contrast more action / adventure games coming out in the US.

3D is already a big story in the US, and we'll be introducing our first 3D games this year as well.

There's still a question of whether subscription-based pricing models will come to Europe this year, which a lot of people are eager to see. In the US, we already use connectivity quite a bit.

For example, we've got a game called Surviving High School '07, which lets subscribers to the game download new episodes every couple of weeks. That connectivity really makes the game play quite differently to the mobile games that people are used to.

Connected gaming does add something totally different, so we'll have to see if it's made into a reality in Europe this year.

I certainly see off-portal sales increasing in Europe. Jamster is now owned by Fox, so they'll have more resource to do stuff. In the UK, Game is doing some interesting things on its website, and so is Tesco.

There'll be more discovery points for mobile games, although I don't see the way games are represented on operator portals changing that much. In the US, they show video clips of the gameplay, but I don't see the portals evolving that much.

That said, everyone recognises that preloading demos on phones is quite effective as a way of getting people to try games, so all the operators will be adopting that to some degree.

It's something we're continuing to discuss and look at internally, but we'll only be able to talk about it when there's something to say. So there's nothing I can talk about right now I'm afraid!