Interviews

"We'll be working on Symbian for sure," says EA Mobile's Euro boss

But the publisher isn't neglecting low-end handsets, explains Javier Ferreira in part two of our interview

"We'll be working on Symbian for sure," says EA Mobile's Euro boss
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Yesterday, we quizzed EA Mobile's European boss Javier Ferreira about what console ports require to be good on mobile, as well as issues around brands and original mobile games.

Today, in part two of our interview, high-end gaming is up for discussion, as well as asking EA about whether it's doing a good job on low-end handsets.

EA Mobile has always been open about its belief in high-end gaming on mobile, including 3D and native gaming. Is that starting to take off yet?

Yes. One of the challenges mobile gaming has had has been the performance of the platform: it's been difficult to deliver a good gaming experience. I've heard people say it's not about high-end gaming, or 3D, it's about casual 'blah blah blah blah'. But wait a second.

We've got 30 to 40 per cent of the UK population spending £40 on buying these console games to play. Of course they'll love something that gets close to that in the mobile space in terms of graphical quality and playability.

So this will be one of the big avenues for growth, there's no doubt about it.

On the other hand, look at a machine like the DS, which has 3D capabilities, but most of the top ten games are non-3D. So it's not a question of a particular feature. It's not all about 3D. But as the mobile platform gets better, if publishers are smart they'll be able to offer better experiences, which is exciting for everybody.

Is there a risk of leaving people behind with more basic handsets? Some games, including Need For Speed Carbon, have been criticised for being not as good on low-end handsets as they are on the latest phones.

One of the challenges of this business is the fragmentation of the mobile handsets, and the difficulty of communicating how good a single game is across different handset 'families'. In general, yes, you are going to focus more on the better versions of the game, but ultimately there are two ways of addressing the challenge.

Firstly, at the development level we have to make sure every single game we develop is as good as that particular handset can deliver. It would be interesting to get more insight into the kind of comments you're getting on Pocket Gamer, but I think consumers are aware that their handset can deliver a certain kind of experience, but that some other handsets will deliver a different kind of experience.

We can't just try and take the high-end version of a game and try to fit it into the low-end handsets. Instead it's about delivering a specific version for those handsets, and making sure the experience is good.

Secondly, there's the marketing side, which is more challenging. It's difficult and confusing to advertise all the different versions – here's Need For Speed, the high-end version, and if you have these other handsets, you'll get this version, and so on. It could go on indefinitely!

Right now we're delivering each game for over 300 handsets in Europe alone, so it's difficult. But ultimately, someone with a Series 40 Nokia phone is not expecting a screen 'this big' [he motions] with 3D graphics.

One of the good things about what Nokia's now doing with the N-Gage is that they're going to bring predictability. You'll know what to expect from an N-Gage phone, so that will be good from a consumer's perspective: you won't have that disappointment.

As the gap gets bigger between the best gaming handsets and the basic ones, will you separate them out though? Eidos recently released their 3D Tomb Raider game only for high-end handsets, for example. They didn't try to turn it into a low-end game, too.

At the moment, the way we're approaching this it to try to bring particular propositions across all the handset families. Inevitably, the difference between the low-end versions and high-end versions will be increasingly big, because the best handsets will get better, and the bottom will stay pretty much the same.

I do think you'll see games developed specifically for those high-end handsets, like we've seen with Eidos. But in general, when we bring a game to market, we'll be hitting the whole platform.

Yes, we'll be developing some games specifically for high-end handsets, so when we do a Symbian game, we probably won't be releasing it for Java handsets. But when we bring something like FIFA, we'll have a Java 2D, Java 3D and Symbian version, and it will be 11-a-side football across all those handsets.

Symbian sounds interesting – you're following Gameloft and Glu in developing Symbian games then?

Yeah. We talk about N-Gage, but really we should also be talking about native platforms such as Symbian that allow you to deliver a much better gaming experience. So we'll be working on Symbian and delivering some great-quality games on that platform for sure. We'd be foolish not to exploit the full potential of it.

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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.)