Interview: T-Mobile's Neil Holroyd talks to Pocket Gamer

At Pocket Gamer, we often interview the people who make mobile games – the developers and publishers – but not so often the people responsible for selling them. That'll be the mobile operators, mainly. Yet they're extremely important factors in what games are sold, and when we get our hands on new technologies like connected gaming.

Neil Holroyd is T-Mobile's UK content manager for games, gambling and alert services. The operator's been quite active recently, launching its connected gaming service with Terraplay, and also real-money gambling with Cecure. We grabbed Neil for a chat about these, and other trends in mobile gaming.

I feel there's a huge future in connected gaming, and it goes way beyond multiplayer, opening up things like more levels, more lives, episodic gaming, pay-per-play, rentals, tournaments... The possibilities are endless.

Take something like The Sims. If you've got a connected solution, you can download extra rooms for your house, new characters and items. Or for puzzle games you can download extra packs of puzzles. Then there's the community aspect of this as well. As a nation, the UK is very big on communities and social networking, and this connectivity is where games fit into social networking.

Terraplay offered me the flexibility that I need, and for my [publisher] partners too, so they can choose certain aspects of what they want to use, but everything fits inside my house, with a central lobby that everything works around.

All of the UK operators have been sitting round a table with ELSPA and talking about how we can work together to make the mobile games market more simple, and help it to grow.

Connected gaming is one of the topics we're working on, and the other operators have all been given a presentation on what we're doing at T-Mobile. We've got an agreement between ourselves that whoever we choose to run our connected services, we'll get them to work together. So if I'm using Terraplay and Vodafone is using Exit Games, for example, they'll still be able to work together.

All the elements are going to be important to each other. I look at it as connected gaming, with multiplayer being just one aspect. I think the biggest aspect will be the flexibility of billing with stuff like pay-to-play and rentals.

Most people buying mobile games now are contract customers, who don't have to worry about whether they can afford a £5 game if they don't have enough credit left on their prepay account. But the vast majority of the UK public are on pay-as-you-go, and have a problem when it comes to paying these kinds of prices. Pay-per-play and game rental brings pricing down to under a pound, which is much more appealing for them.

So flexible billing will be one of the biggest aspects of connected gaming, and then multiplayer will be one of the middle areas.

Yes, we've been live since the end of January, and we have three games now. Ocean Wars is like a futuristic battleships for up to four players, while Badlands is a land-type battle where you're driving tanks and buggies and stuff, shooting at each other. And finally Scrobble is a word-based game.

We've got a good seven to eight more games in the pipeline too, and when you look ahead to the third quarter of this year, we'll see a lot more publishers bringing connected elements into their games. I've done it first, and we just need one more operator to make the next move to build momentum.

Also, our service is global too, so we have T-Mobile in Austria and the Netherlands also working with Terraplay, and then Germany will come on board as well, while we've been talking to Terraplay about getting a US partner, too, to get both sides of the timezone playing.

And then we're doing tournament stuff too, so next month we'll have a Carol Vorderman's Mind Aerobics tournament with Player X.

Well, this is where some partners need to work with me more, rather than introducing their own high score tables. If I see that happening, I will remove their games. It has to fit within my proposition, or gamers will be confused if different games work in different ways.

I'm focusing on the fun aspect. The mobile phone isn't a PC where people put high stakes on. It's all about little 10p bets, and you dip in and out the same way you would with a mobile game. It's adding that challenge of winning cash, like going into arcades and playing on the 2p-drop machines.

So with something like poker, you're getting the same buzz you would playing on the PC, but just not for the same money. I chose Cecure Gaming because they have trusted poker brands like World Poker Tour, which is important to bring some security to the user. They know they're playing with a company that has a good reputation, and Cecure have regular checks and monitoring.

We're moving away from virtual casinos though. We have a virtual dog race game coming up where you can bet 10p on a virtual race. And we've also got a Bingo game coming. So we're taking it away from those hardcore gambling aspects like sports betting, to something more fun.

There's a few. Partners are looking a lot more into branded IP, having seen the success of Deal Or No Deal. Everyone's thinking "What's the next one, and can we get hold of it?". Even publishers who have maintained in the past that they have no interest in branded IP are now looking into it, as they see it has a future in the UK market.

So for Deal Or No Deal, gamers knew instantly what to expect, and because they got what they expected, they weren't disappointed.

Other partners are moving into communities, user-generated content and mobile TV, and can then combine those aspects together. So if they go for a brand, like a TV show or movie, they can deliver a complete package that's more than just a game. It's an entertainment experience.

From the operators' point of view, we're all working more closely to position ourselves as more of a retail chain. In console, people launch games simultaneously on different platforms to maximise their marketing spend, but in mobile, we operators vary our launch dates all over the place.

We've reached a commitment that we'll commit to a single day to launch certain games, so we can have proper nationwide launches. It helps when we work with console brands like THQ, making mobile just another platform. And then, as I said, the operators are also working to remove barriers around things like pricing, that stop people playing mobile games.

There's definitely a place for it, I'm a big believer. The UK public tends to trust brands, yet those brands sometimes do disappoint them. With an original IP, more often than not you get a better gameplay experience – they're fantastic games, because they don't have to rely on brand equity.

With something like Deal Or No Deal, a publisher has a very focused scope in terms of what you do in the game, but with original IP you have freedom of thought about what to do. The only problem with original IP is that users don't know what to expect, but it's crucial we offer those games – they give us a far superior experience than most of the branded titles.

So what are we doing? I think it's important to offer free demos, and we have a free demo category on our portal that focuses mainly on original IP. The challenge to our partners is to make a demo that's so exciting and addictive that people have to then buy the game. We're seeing average conversion rates of between 4 per cent and 12 per cent for those.

Yes, it started at the beginning of March, and is running until early April around our retro arcade section, which has always been a consistent performer. The promotion's called Arcade Mania, and it has a selection of classic arcade games.

So we've got Street Fighter II and Final Fight from Capcom, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man from Namco, Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble from Taito, and Frogger from Konami. People who buy the games are entered into prize draws for things like a Street Fighter II arcade machine, or a PS3.

We're certainly looking at the area, and doing some trials around the idea of next-generation gaming. I do have reservations though. I don't think it's going to be a mass-market thing – far from it.

There's also an issue about whether I can get these things transferred into my community that I'm doing with Terraplay, so that's where I'm working with the likes of Nokia to figure that out.

These manufacturers are trying to position themselves as platform providers, keeping their audience quite small. So the Nokia thing only works on Nokia, the Sony Ericsson thing only works on Sony Ericsson. This doesn't help operators. It has to be cross-operator, cross-handsets, and cross-countries. That's where the manufacturers are currently making their mistakes.