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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
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.
I have a friend who runs a PR firm catering to the mobile apps industry, and they've all told him that they plan on their iPhone products being the bulk of their revenues by the middle of 2010, and putting all their other versions into maintenance mode. The development costs for the other smart phones aren't worth it between the different APIs per vendor and different UI and menu layouts, etc, that vary per carrier.
The iPhone totally changed the game.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Yup. Android still has the same problems that drove my company away from mobile development for years. There are just too many variables. Sure there's only one Android phone now, but a year from now... Here's a short list of variables that need to be accounted for on an android phone:
Resolution
Aspect ratio
Anamorphic pixels (yes, really, on a few handsets)
Button placement and layout. (Nothing at all can be taken for granted. Not even the existence of buttons.)
System permissions (which are determined on both a per model and per network basis.)
Memory availability
CPU speed.
System events (incoming call handling, etc.)
Optional input (GPS, Motion, multitouch, microphone, etc.)
"Yes" you say, "But don't I have to take into account these things on any desktop application?" No. Not to this extent. It's easy to make an interface that works at both 800x600 and 1920×1080. It's a much greater challenge to make one that looks good at 480x320 work at 128x160. (Even class A publishers are guilty of making games that are readable in HD but not SD. Phones are a much greater challenge.)
Catching and dealing with all of these fringe cases in programming and testing is a nightmare and significantly drives up the cost of something that is, frankly, very low margin to begin with. We found even developing for Palm was a better decision than mobile phones. (Though we even decided against that in the end.)
As one example of the blah of the market, the only reason anyone developed N-Gauge games was that Nokia financed 100% of the development.
However we're prototyping games for the iPhone at the moment. The SDK, path to market, and hardware support, and handsets in the field make it much more attractive than we've ever seen the mobile market in any country at any time.
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
The iPhone is .05% of world cellphone market, Blackberry is .72% (peaked at ~2.1%). MIDP 2.0 is a whopping 69.46%! All numbers taken from here. I would say developing for MIDP 2.0 and tweaking where devices significantly vary from the standard is probably the way to go.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.