March 19, 2008

Casual Games Are the Future of Mobile Gaming, Says Namco Networks
By Louis Bedigian

“Why make a game that lasts a year when you could make a game that lasts five, six, plus years?”

Whenever I hear of a study claiming that casual games are the future on any platform, I wonder: if lighthearted and simpler games are what players want, why are the hardcore games (Halo, Smash Bros., etc.) still number-one?

This is not the case for the mobile phone market, where the majority of its players do not, if only for the time being, fit into the typical gamer demographic. The people I see playing Pac-Man on their phones don’t necessarily have an Xbox 360 at home. But that’s not the reason why Namco Networks, a leading publisher of mobile games, believes that casual games are the future. In a study conducted by Interpret, a digital media research firm, Namco Networks learned the following:

• During 2007 casual games reached over 145 million people ages 12-65.
• Last year, the average time spent per week playing casual games increased 28 percent (from 4 hours to 5.1 hours) from Q3 to Q4.
• In 2007, 33 percent of casual gamers played online with another person.
• Casual games appeal to far more female gamers than traditional games, as well as a slightly older audience.

GameZone spoke with Jason Ford, Vice President of Strategy and Planning for Namco Networks, to learn the significance of this study, the future of Namco Networks and more.

Pac-Man: an all-time classic.

Start by telling us what you do at Namco Networks.

Jason Ford: I do a little bit of everything – a jack of all trades, hopefully a master of a couple. My role is to figure out where the company is going whether it’s platforms, whether it’s territories, whether it’s individual games. I’m kind of keeping my ear to the ground all the time with trends, brands, technology and so forth.

I also do a little bit of PR, hence the reason we’re talking again. Part of my thing, it’s kind of an unofficial title, but I call myself the “Guru of Casual.” As you may or may not know there are a lot of games that are very into games. I like games but I try to keep myself very casual in my taste for games, which helps us in the market we’re going after no matter what business we’re into, whether it’s iPods, PDAs or mobile phones or what have you.

Why is this study significant?

JF: One of the things that [Interpret] pointed out to us, was kind of what casual games were doing for this market. [Casual games are] kind of dismissed by people as being simplistic stuff. But it’s really big business, whether it’s on PC casual, mobile, or iPods. If you look at the top 10 lists over time, they really tend to focus on a group of people who could consider themselves active gamers but not necessarily hardcore gamers. They won’t be waiting in any lines for new game systems, but [still] spend quite a bit of time playing games. And there are a lot of [those types of players]. They’re not as vocal as people who consider themselves to be fanboys or hardcore, big-time gamers. But they are a significant number of people. That, coupled with the fact that they’re active, makes for very big business.

Dilbert Cubicle Chaos is the newest title from Namco Networks.

But in the future won’t hardcore games be where the biggest success lies? On the console and handheld market, hardcore reigns supreme. You might have a niche/casual game like Cooking Mama that sells a few hundred thousand to a million copies, but it’s the hardcore games that sell many millions.

JF: I don’t think they [hardcore games on mobile phones] should be dismissed. But let me give you a story from when we were in a focus group. We were talking to people about games and a guy came in, from New York, and he was a customizer for cars and motorcycles. He had tattoos on both arms. We asked what is your favorite game of all time – it could be a board game, a video game, whatever. [His answer was] Total Annihilation. Not being a huge gamer, I actually didn’t know what it was but kind of figured out what it was.

So we go through this focus group and we talk about casual games on mobile phones, iPods and so forth. And there was a change in him – it’s like he became an entirely different person who was passionate about these games. Because he knew them, because he had played them. So I called the moderator from the back as I sit behind these one-way mirrors and said, “Ask this guy some questions to help us reconcile the bad-ass Total Annihilation [personality] and this guy who is borderline giddy with games on his phone that are not Total Annihilation or anything in that realm. The guy basically said, “Hey, I really love games, and when I’m [able to] have this big, rich experience, I play differently than when I’m out and about. I still want to be competitive, I still want to play games. But I’m playing different types of games.”

Namco Networks has games on mobile phones, iPods and other similar devices. Have you considered any other platforms, such as Xbox Live Arcade?

JF: Part of my responsibility it proliferating these things out as far as I can. I can’t share with you our future plans in relation to this kind of stuff, but yeah, Xbox Live Arcade is another good example [of casual game success]. The things that work well on there, things like Pac-Man Championship Edition, which has not only done well sales-wise but some critics are really enjoying it, guys who would consider themselves very, very, heavy, heavy gamers. [They’re] going this is cool, this is great, taking a game, keeping the spirit and moving it into the present time.

Look at Wii, right? Everyone is scrambling to make games that are more family/casual-oriented. Look at the PC online casual space: there’s rarely, if anything, ever geared toward the demographic of Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

[Mobile phones are] the beginning platform that almost everybody in the country has in their hands. People like the games, and our responsibility is to educate them on what kind of games they can play so that they can have games that they know and love, whether it’s the classic stuff like Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig-Dug, Ms. Pac-Man, or if they’re into something that’s more technically advanced. That’s our approach to go really mass market. And there are others doing the hardcore stuff – but they rarely last, they’re not nearly as evergreen as the mass-market titles. They may pop up next to a movie, as [its] movie is up and about, or at the launch of a [similar console title], but it’s not much of a long-term game. Why make a game that lasts a year when you could make a game that lasts five, six, plus years?

Atlantis Sky Patrol

What does this mean for Namco Networks? What kinds of games do you have in the pipeline and beyond that would meet this demand?

JF: Well, it’s not something that we’ve talked about [publicly], which is kind of a tough situation for folks like yourself that want to know those things. We’re unable to share that future roadmap. Needless to say, some of the places we look to for inspiration is the PC casual market. We have a game called Atlantis Sky Patrol from Big Fish Games, which is a big-time producer of casual games in the PC market. It’s like Magnetica or Zooma or Luxor but three times better and fits on your phone with 100+ levels. I’ve actually finished it twice – so it’s not that I don’t like games, I just play a certain genre of games that are probably considered more casual.

You’ll probably see more of the retro type stuff of the games we do. And then…you’ll probably see some technology-based stuff as well.

Are there any games coming from the Namco Bandai family of hits? Could a mobile version of Soul Calibur be in your future?

JF: Whether or not we [will] is a tough thing is because we want to stay true to the Namco Networks brand. Even the first version of Soul Calibur [would be difficult to port] to a mobile phone. [We want it to run] on a ton of devices. It may be workable on high-end devices. But one of our mantras is to make our games available and playable to anybody, regardless of handset, regardless of network.

We work hard to stay on top of our relationship with the carriers. And also, when you’re working across so many devices, when we tell people, “Go people and play Mr. Do!,” we don’t want to put an asterisk there saying only available on such and such device. That’s one of the limitations – Namco Bandai does not want us to do things that can’t be done well.

Going forward, when do you think it is that we’ll know what’s coming next from Namco Networks?

JF: Spring 2008. And what we do is, we [tend to] come out with games one at a time. There are a couple of our competitors that say here’s what our Q1, Q2, Q3 schedule looks like. But that’s not the way we operate, partially because of the situation we’re in. We’re not a public company, per se. We are public in Japan, but our business does not get reported in any kind of detail. We enjoy being a quiet giant, and in so doing we hold things very close to our chest until they’re truly ready to go, so when I tell you a game is about to launch, it’s about to launch, and there’s not the opportunity that it’ll be pushed out or delayed.

Ridge Racer made its mobile debut in 2006.

Overseas there are a lot of mobile companies that offer free play in exchange for advertisements. That’s not the big strategy in America, but do you see this as an opportunity? Is this something Namco Networks wants to explore?

JF: That’s a very good question, and is a point we’ve thought about and discussed quite a bit internally at Namco and with VisiTech, our PR firm. We do not believe in giving content away for free. We have been training customers to pay for games – a lot of education goes on to let people know not only what games are out there and how to [get them], but that the games will exceed their expectations. Which his one of the biggest things we want to do. When we have a title out there, someone downloads it and says, “That’s exactly what I thought it was going to be,” or better.

For ad-based games, we don’t really want to participate in that. It’s funny, there were some statistics from Greystripe, which has a free game site called GameJump, had announced at the Game Developers Conference that one of their biggest independent publishers makes $14,000 a quarter off of ad revenue from their mobile game. That’s not much money. Maybe for someone who’s independent and can sort of squeeze it out. But to support as many devices as you need to, even if you get it down to the easiest way (to port from device to device), you’re still at about $100 a device. You [could be] in the $500 range, and if you want it on a lot of devices, the math adds up quickly. We all know, if anyone was a part of the Internet bust, that those things [ad revenue in mobile phones] are going to go down.

If they’re not able to support, if that’s the statistic that’s out there from one of the leaders in the space, it worries me a bit that there isn’t a model when it comes to giving away games for free and putting advertising around it.

Thank you for your time.

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