Gameloft's Gonzague de Vallois talks to Pocket Gamer

Last week's 3GSM show was a good time to catch up with the great and good of the mobile games industry, as they descended on Barcelona to talk shop and show off their latest games.

EA Mobile may dominate the console industry, but in mobile it's got stern competition from Gameloft. The French publisher was founded in 1999, and has built a string of big hits, with brands from King Kong to Deal Or No Deal, and its own monster sellers like Block Breaker and Midnight Pool. Plus the glamour of mobile games based on Paris Hilton and Desperate Housewives, of course.

We sat down at 3GSM with Gonzague de Vallois, Gameloft's vice president of worldwide publishing.

Yes, the industry is getting more mature, and everyone's working hard to grow the business. We're just starting to hear operators talking about off-portal, advertising and search, which are all interesting trends.

Plus new channels are emerging, like Nokia jumping into the games business again. It's good for everybody, because it shows they believe in it, and after all they're the worldwide mobile phone leader. It seems there won't be any strange devices, and a good retail strategy, so if they do it well, it will be very positive.

What we need today is more marketing to grow awareness of mobile games, which is still too low. New channels and mobile search will help. Plus 3D is really big for us, not just for gamers, but also for any casual experience where it makes sense. 3D Solitaire might not make sense now, for example, but 3D Poker? Maybe.

It's partly true. If you're a gamer, you probably won't play on your phone right now, because the games are from 20 years ago, and that's too far away. But when you start to show them 1MB 3D games, they say "Wow, that's a real game". It doesn't mean they'll all play more, but some of them might, so it's one way forward.

But that said, this is a different business from the video game business. The hardcore gamer will always have a better experience and enjoy playing more on his PSP than on his mobile phone. We will never catch up with the PSP, whatever processor we put inside the phones.

So let's play in our field, which is even more exciting, because it's not a specialist market like the video game market is. Twenty or 30 million videogamers are driving a huge business there, but it's a niche in terms of numbers [of people playing], even if it is a very big business.

On mobile, it's a small revenue per game, but potentially there are penetration rates that are truly mass-market. If you look at Japan and Korea, penetration rates of mobile games there is 15 per cent.

I think that's right, we're closer to the Web than to console or PSP. Our key target on this platform is not the gamers, and you can see that based on the fact that last year, only 18 per cent of our sales came from our Ubisoft licenses, whereas three years ago it was more like 70 per cent.

In mobile now, we're still seeing penetration rates of around 5 per cent. But we see in countries where you have good handsets, good networks and a good retail strategy on the operator portals, that penetration rate can be more like 15-20 per cent. Once you get that, word of mouth spreads more and more, which is what makes this very exciting.

Yes. The thing is that today, the marketing of mobile games is very limited. People choose a game from the name on the operator portal. Take Tropical Madness, which is one of our games that had wonderful reviews, and is a very cool game, but it didn't sell as much as a Zuma or a Lost, because many people didn't want to spend five euros based on a name they didn't recognise.

That's why today brands are more important maybe than they should be. However, our top-selling game is Block Breaker, which isn't a brand – or at least wasn't at the beginning: it's becoming one now. It shows there is room to create new titles, but with the name of the game you have to give enough information to the user so they'll go for it.

On the licensing side, we still have a pretty balanced approach, and last year 60 per cent of our sales were done with our own IP, so it's still the majority. We're pretty picky on the brands, and we try to take only the top ones, which will make a good game, and will suit or extend our audience.

For example, we saw that more females were playing mobile games, so Desperate Housewives was the perfect match. We'll keep our picky strategy in the different areas: TV series, game shows, movies, sports players, celebrities and video game brands.

Firstly, I think that many journalists are getting tired of seeing the latest platform, racing or football game. So you value originality, and new concepts, especially as with the limitations of mobile gaming in 2D today, it's hard to be creative.

We hear that from some operators too, who say, "Ah, you have another racer this year...". But yes, it's a key genre, and we are still able to bring innovation. So I won't do a crazy game just to please people and be innovative, because with the limitations in how people choose what games to buy, I'm more confident that my racing game with 'racing' in the title will sell better than Tornado Mania.

What is Tornado Mania, if you're a non-expert in the mobile games business, and you haven't read any reviews? What does it mean? This isn't a criticism, though. For ourselves, we loved Tropical Madness, but it didn't sell as good as we expected.

You value originality and original concepts, but the mass market is pretty basic. Something like Block Breaker is not very innovative. It's good, it's well designed, and it's a very good game, but not that innovative. It's selling well because people understand what it is.

So that's the issue with original IP and concepts. Even if they're valued by the mobile games community, they won't sell.

I know our creative people would love to find the new untouched idea that's mass market enough to sell. I think they're still looking for it!

Don't forget that there is also creativity in making a good solitaire game for mobile. Our guys work a lot on the character design and the atmosphere.

That's the main issue with Symbian – where do you get these games?! The platform is great, it gives more power, a better quality experience, you can do 3D... so our producers and developers love it.

But on the business side, Symbian has never been launched as a platform. It's an operating system, which means nothing to anybody. There's never been a real launch of the platform with the operators, which is the first point.

The distribution of Symbian games is very limited, and we don't see much change in this direction. Nokia is going very high-end with NGI [the next-gen N-Gage platform], but there are millions of Series 60 handsets out there, and not many games for them.

But what we do see is that Java 3D is really coming. We're now launching our 3D games on over 100 handsets, and I think more and more handsets coming out will be 3D-capable.

There were several reasons. First, there are many countries which we don't currently cover with our distribution network. So if you're in Dubai and want to buy a Gameloft game... Well, now you can.

Secondly, in some countries the data charges are so high, it just kills you. You have to sell your mother and car to download a game over the air, which isn't ideal!

But we also want to shake the system a little bit. We see richer and stronger handsets coming out, so we can make better and better games, but there are limitations. We have to limit file sizes to 300Kb, because of the data traffic, and because we don't want people to wait 10 minutes to download a game.

There's no marketing plan behind Connect. It's just there. But we're starting to open discussions with the operators on this. Many of them also offer broadband internet, for example, so it can tie into that. Today, distributing mobile games over the Web is not a big channel for us, but then it wasn't for music five years ago, and iTunes made it very simple, and changed all that.

So when we launched Connect, we had some carriers calling us saying 'What are you doing?!', but when we explained it, they started talking about putting it on their websites.

Oh, finally, another reason is the piracy. On high-end handsets that come with cables and connect to your PC, well, if you type 'Lost' on Kazaa, you'll find what you need. So this is also a way of saying that if we are selling games for seven euros plus three euros in data charges, and people can get them for free on Kazaa... it doesn't work. So that's another reason for Connect.

Ha ha ha! We're working on it, I promise.