Slashdot Mirror
How To Find a Mobile Games Publisher?
n01 writes "In the last few months of my spare time, I've been implementing an abstract strategy board game (that I invented) along with a decent AI. The game resembles TwixT in that it is also a connection game, and could be played without the need for a cellphone or computer. The implementation on the Java 2 Mobile Edition platform will soon be finished, with only some minor usability and sound issues to fix. While I enjoyed working on the game (actually more than on my day job as a programmer) I would still like to earn some money from selling the game, so I can work more on such projects in the future. What experiences have Slashdot readers had with selling their applications/games for mobile phones? With which publisher will I have the broadest audience and achieve the highest earnings? Would you try to publish the game both as a mobile game and a traditional board game?"
the obvious answer is, of course, opensource it and make money from related services, you insensitive clod!
I'm sorry Mario, but your profit is in another castle.
There's the cost of the developer SDK, getting your license, getting signed up on whatever development channel/website/thing the vendor wants everyone to play nice in, then you have to submit your work along with your SSN, DOB, and 3 drops of blood from your first born... Takes about 4-6 weeks to process your request, at which point... You find out that you violated some patent for using a contextual-menu based system utilizing the prefrontal lobes of sentient bipedal organisms for navigation and you actually owe them money.
There is no market for innovative games in the cell phone market-- There is only Zuul.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I've been thinking about doing a cellphone game and what I thought regarding distribution is to both sell it over a channel (like the Google Android Market) and GPL it. There are several profitable business that work this way (MySQL comes to my mind) and it's an interesting gamble.
IMO, people who buy cellphone games for a dollar are not the people who will download and install GPLed games on their cellphone. Doing that you should maximize the number of people that uses your game without loosing money because of people that downloads the game and installs instead of just buying it. A paypal link (or similar) would also be a nice adition in the game web page.
That's where the cash is. Or so I hear.
Granted it's been about 5 years since I did cellphone development, but back then every phone was different and required tweaking or custom support, and each vendor had their own Java API. Some used BREW instead of Java, which is/was an entirely different language (I spent a couple weeks rewriting a game from BREW to Java).
That said, EA might be your best bet, they have a strong cellphone market presence now.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
gamejump.com I was recently in the same position as you and when I asked around, that was the site I was recommended.
The problem in J2ME development is the cost of porting and QA. So my guess is that you will have hard time finding a publisher for your title, since the publisher would need to invest signifigant amount of resources to port and do QA for the title. Also, pretty much all mobile publishers have own porting platforms built on top of basic J2ME, so they would need to "port" your game to the platform as well. So in the worst case they would need to pretty much re-do your game. Plus they would need to negotiate some deal with you, which would cost time and money as well. So unless your game is extremely addictive and it shows in 2 minute gameplay, I think you can forget about finding a good mobile publisher for it.
I personally believe that DonationWare is one of the best ways to go, that is accept donations, but don't otherwise charge or license. For the following reasons:
1) People will pirate your shit either way. There is no stopping it. Pirating in itself is a game of sorts.
2) If its donation ware you don't have to feel bad providing absolutely no support.
3) Any kind of licensing system you can come up with will either be a huge time sync on your and people will crack it anyways.
4) The more your product is available to be distributed the more people will hear about it, increasing the possibility that someone may willingly send you money.
A recent article here on ./ stated that there game was pirated at an 80-90% meaning that only between 10 and 20 percent actually paid for it. Since pirating is inevitable why not instead increase your market size by making it freely available. Then the 10-20% of that increased market is going to be much more then if you were to try and license it through some scheme or another.
A great analogy is Trojan condom's marketing tactic. Trojan controls the vast majority of the market because they are well known among other reasons. It is hard for them to increase their market share anymore because there are only so many people who buy condoms and there are a lot of variety out there. So instead of trying to market customers away from another company they instead try to increase the market be trying to appeal to a wider variety of people.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
People apparently make a bit of money by uploading their games to casual game sites, like Kongregate. Anybody can do this, and if your game becomes popular, you get a taste of the advertising revenue. The problem there is that only Flash games seem to be supported. Perhaps there's a way to compile a Java program to flash bytecodes instead of Java bytecodes?
Ever since I got my first PDA, I've downloaded (and often bought) mobile device software from sites like Handango. Google for "mobile software". Their mainstay seems to one-programmer shops like yours. Don't know how you get your software there, but it can't be hard.
Third idea: just put the software on your own web site, together with an Amazon or PayPal tip jar. Sometimes you can make more money by using your invention to create good will than you can by productizing it. I think over the years I've spend as much money rewarding authors of innovative mobile device freeware as I have buying software for these same devices.
An emerging revenue model is advergaming.
:) And "piracy" becomes everyone's friend ;) The more the game spreads, the happier everyone becomes!
:)
You could hook up with an ad agency or whatever brand/sponsor you manage to negotiate with, and then have them license or buy the game from you as a viral advergame and brand it with a product.
It's a pretty good business model and brings in money for some game developers/agencies.
Essentially, instead of selling the game to individual users, it's the sponsor/brand who "buys" or licenses it and signs your paycheck, and then the players get to download and spread it for free.
You can either sell the rights to the game to a sponsor, or have them license it for branding/skinning but you retain the rights. It's all up to whatever you negotiate.
The nice thing about this that you don't have to worry about sales management anymore. It's kinda win-win for the player too. Sponsors get their branding out, players get their game for free
It's what we did for some browser and mobile phone Flash games we made.
Best of luck!
http://www.object404.com
...he said it's in J2ME. NOT objective C. Why one would want to port to obj c unless they meant to make some serious cash off the apple store is beyond me. Awkward language.
I know RIM has an upcoming app store, and Blackberry platforms run at least a subset of J2ME. I'm not a java guy so I can't say for sure how extensive the support is. Try giving it a go on a blackberry (if you don't have one, almost certainly someone you know does) and see if it runs. If it does, or all it needs is some minor tweaking, you're in business.
See, I used to work within the depths of the mobile apps industry, so I pretty much have first hand knowledge of this sort of info. For example, when I worked for this dev that primarily worked on games and personalization apps for cellphones, most of the time, we went straight to the carrier to get our apps on the "deck," which is industry slang for the carrier's applications store that you access from your phone, hence we had business relationships with the major carriers. However, when that company first started out, it had to rely heavily on publishers, which in turn busted their balls in terms of QA'ing the apps to meet the dreaded carrier requirements.
When I was over there, I had to work with this publisher called Airborne for supporting one of our flagship games on AT&T. We tried our best to essentially cut them off completely in order to go direct to the carrier instead, but like the parasites that they are, they were ready to turn the tables on us and affect already live builds out on the market by killing off our subscription based system that is at the heart of the game in question. So we had no choice but to stay with them and put up with their piss poor staff that were in my honest opinion, some of the shittiest QA testers I've ever worked with, always reporting non-issues thinking that they are showstopper bugs, hence they held back submission to the carrier due to false alarms.
On the other hand, there are times you will need publishers since some of them hold the necessary digital signatures necessary to use certain MIDP API's locked out by the carrier. Case in point: T-Mobile, which requires THEIR very own digital signature to use the network on a J2ME midlet. Problem is: that sort of sig is only given out to big time mobile distributors and developers, so a person like you for example that runs a small time operation will have to rely on a publisher. What's worst is that when I worked on T-Mobile builds, I also had to work with Airborne and constantly send the builds to get signed in order to run it on the phones, and that would either take hours, or in some cases, days to get back fully signed, further slowing down the development process.
Long story short, take your game directly to the carriers, cut the middleman, I say again, bypass him. Your game is near completion right, so surely you can easily whip up a demo that you can present to the carrier's product manager, and garner enough interest on their end to establish a business relationship with them. You're better off showing it to AT&T first since they're the largest J2ME phone carrier in the country, and most of their MIDP API's aren't locked down like the ones you need to playback video and sound. However, you're going to have to invest some money into things like digital signatures and more handsets to test it on, since once you get your foot through the door, they're going to want you to port your game to high priority devices like the RAZR and the low end LG's and Samsungs, so you have to make sure that your code is scalable to support these crappy, but high selling handsets. If I were you, I would just pool up some money to get yourself a few phones off of eBay, like a Moto RAZR, since the install base on AT&T is in the tens of millions, and a tiny screen phone like the LG CG225, which is slow as hell and has Jar size limits, but like the RAZR, is more prevalent among customers in the network. Pro-tip: the shittiest phones sold by AT&T are always the ones on the top of the priority list. Basically, the easy part was creating a working app, the hard is yet to come, where you have to port your code to various other handsets, which will mean different screen sizes, speed, and heap memory available, plus the bugs associated with them.
However, if you want to take the independent route, you could also try a site like hovr.com for example, which provides free games to users, but the devs get a cut of the ad revenues. Still, you would have to invest on at minimum a digital signature to ensur
Buy a used Intel Mac Mini, download the iPhone development tools, and convert your software to Objective-C with UIKit. Once its done, for $99 you get access to the most professional and most profitable shop for mobile phone software - the iTunes App Store. Do a search about what has been reported about revenues. You set the price that the end user pays, and you get to keep 70 percent of that. In the last quarter, Apple was the third largest mobile phone manufacturer by revenue, and all of that revenue is iPhone. On top of that you can sell to iPod Touch users, and there are a few million of those around. And that is a market full of people who will actually _look_ at the iTunes App Store, so your application will be seen, and who are used to paying out actual cash for things.
Quite a few years ago I wrote a J2ME Bluetooth racing game (along with an artist friend). We secured a popular license and publisher for it, and the previews and reviews were good (in real printed magazines!). We then sat back waiting for the mountains of cash to be delivered to our doors. It didn't happen. The game didn't get the exposure we were expecting, for whatever reason.
Not to be deterred, we took an improved version of the game engine (since the license was tied to the publisher) and developed something new. Our previous lesson learned (don't tie yourself into stupid deals) we found a new publisher. A small one, but one who assured us premium placement on a popular brand of handsets. The testing period dragged out, much frustration ensued, but the game finally launched. Again, to good reviews (not as good as before, since this time the game was starting to show its age).
It didn't really sell. Never mind, we said, we can take the it elsewhere. So we took it to one of the bigger publishers, who would give us less of a cut but a lot more exposure. The game by this time was no longer cutting edge. In 2004, when it was originally created, the renderer was impressive. Fast forward to 2007 and it looks shabby next to the other hi-end racing titles.
Anyway, reviews were still okay and the game sold in decent numbers. That smaller cut, when going through multiple aggregators doesn't amount to much per unit, but the rise in sales make up for it. Or they would have done if we'd managed to get any of it from the distributor, who a year after the deal was signed went into receivership without ever paying a penny.
Developing games anonymously for the big guys made money. Pushing our own stuff never did.
For the curious, you can grab the game's source code here
After about three months of relentless Willy action I reckon I'm now as good as when I was 10.
Releasing to J2ME handsets is a money and time sink; consider Gameloft with their 200+ developers working fulltime on porting to specific handsets.. there are 300+ devices to test on. Consider targetting a single form factor like the iphone instead, or releasing it as a flash game - as a single mechanic without heavy production values would be a little light these days for a pc/mac downloadable.. then you'll probably have a fighting chance.
Best regards,
Emmanuel
n01, you're on the right track thinking about going with a publisher.
I used to run developer programs for a large US wireless carrier, and now do so for a large Latin American wireless carrier. In general, I encourage small Java ME developers not to bury themselves trying to negotiate with the carrier directly. Unless you have something extremely innovative or a brand that a mid-level product manager type in a wireless company can recognize, you're probably going to lose a lot of money, time and brain cells getting anyone who can launch your product at SprATiT-zon to respond to you. And say you DO get their attention: that's almost even worse, since coming up with some kind of content distribution agreement with a gigantic corporation will consume all your waking hours.
So start small, and grow from there depending on how your app does.
- Make sure the stuff works. You should start researching Mobile Publishers out now, but before you do, make sure your game is rock-solid on as many devices as possible.
- Work with a content porting service. There are companies that can help you make sure your game works on all these devices. One I know of that I can recommend (they used to be a development shop as well, they know the pain of the small developer) is Tira Wireless -- they have a program that can take your midlet and help you port it to the hundreds of devices you'll need to build the MIDlet for to get any traction: http://gomobile.tirawireless.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
- Get your MIDlet run through a generic certification program like JavaVerified. Many operators require it, it is a very good basic quality test that meets about 96% of the requirements of any operator, and at least shows that you're serious. One company I've worked with that does a good job with that is NSTL (https://www.nstl.com/javaverified/gui/home_main.asp). The other labs that do Java Verified (RelQ, Babel, CapGemini) also have good reputations.
- Join the developer programs of operators worldwide you'd WANT to work with. It will give you a sense of whether or not they care about developers like you. Companies in English-speaking countries that I think are able/willing to work with smaller developers are AT&T, Orange, Sprint (the Nextel side), T-Mobile to a certain extent, and of course, we are (although I must say that you're probably not quite there yet to work with us, mostly due to language issues). Particularly, make sure you can that it is easy to get the data services you need for your application to work - since yours uses a data network, if it's tricky to get the service (or tricky for you as a developer to get it working) chances are you're going to be hitting a brick wall sooner rather than later. The forums on these sites will give you a good idea of where the pain points are for developers.
NOW, find a publisher.
There are a number Publishers or Aggregators that work with guys like you to get good game placement without trying to gouge you too badly. I will mention two that I have worked with and respect (and that have a good reputation), and that are of a size that would work well with what your game sounds like it does.
- Digital Chocolate - focuses on social mobile games. Good company to do business with from a carrier's perspective. http://www.digitalchocolate.com/
- Cellmania - they're an aggregator that also runs a number of storefronts for various operators worldwide. They do a good job putting apps on the long tail to see what happens with it. http://www.cellmania.com/content_providers/
IF YOU ARE SERIOUS about it, then do this. There is money to be made if your application really is good and different and sticky.
If you're not in a position or willing to spend some money on it up front, or to dedicate s
***Foucault is watching you..***