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Jump Games explains plans for Manchester United mobile games

Six coming this year, including a full footy game

Jump Games explains plans for Manchester United mobile games

Jump Games is cracking on with its series of official Manchester United mobile games, having recently signed the licence and announced its first title: Manchester United Word It!

As we expected, that's a wordsearch game where you have to find Man Utd players' names in grids. We caught up with Jump general manager Aaron Whiteman at Mobile World Congress, and he explained that six games are coming this year, with most of them focused on this kind of casual gameplay.

"We want to get them into as many handsets as possible, so rather than doing just football games like FIFA, we're going to go for games which are puzzle and casual," he said.

However, there will be one full 11-a-side Man Utd mobile game coming this year from Jump Games, according to Whiteman.

"We've just bought an engine from an existing game, and we're going to rebrand it. It'll be Manchester United against world teams, as it's easier on the licensing side of things. We can't use certain clubs or player names, it's quite complicated."

The deal is pretty big for both Jump Games, which is trying to establish itself quickly in mobile, and for Manchester United itself. Whiteman says it's as much about targeting Asian markets like India, China, South Korea and Japan as it is about the UK.

Jump certainly has big plans, too. The company appears to be cash-rich at the moment, with reports that it may have paid more than £50 million for the Man Utd licence. Whiteman naturally refused to comment, although a couple of rival publishers we spoke to put the cost at nearer £30 million.

Either way, Jump seemingly has more money to spend. "We're in a pretty aggressive mode in terms of licensing at the moment, and we're also looking pretty aggressively at acquisitions," he told us, before adding: "There's one or two big-ticket [mobile game] publishers up for grabs at the moment…"

Watch this space, for sure.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)