Mobile Phone Game Publishers

[zoombapup]

Hi Guys.

We're currently adding to our game portfolio with some PC/MAC and mobile games.

I am mostly from a PC/Console background, so I was wondering if anyone had any sage advice.

Whats the typical route to market for mobile games? Assuming we have a portfolio of around half a dozen professional quality games that run on pretty much anything?

Has anyone sold into the mobile market and found a good way of maximizing thier returns?

I'll be doing some proper research into it myself, but I figured a quick question here couldnt harm things.

Phil.

[ErikH2000]

I started an (empty) category here on the wiki:

http://www.indiewiki.org/index.php?PublishersAndDistributors

Phil or anybody else, if you would like to update this list with your findings I would appreciate it. When I have some time I may add some publishers to the list later.

-Erik

[dustinh]

I've done a couple mobile games but didn't have any luck selling them due to choosing a failing platform and portal. It's very similar to what most of everyone is doing here pc gamewise, just different names for the portals (Sprint, Vodafone, Cingular instead of Realarcade etc.) Things to keep in mind...

#1 - Program in J2ME and if you have the time and resources BREW as well. But J2ME is the more dominant of the two.

#2 - Program for the popular handsets. Nokia makes this much easier by having their handsets divided by "Series". I don't know that there's really even much point to developing for the lower-end series at this point. I'd pretty much just aim for Series 60 and higher. Aim for popular handsets that have standardized screen-sizes and such, there aren't many but slowly phone manufactuars are beginning to do this.

#3 - As far as I can tell, develop mainly for the European market because I believe their numbers are better than the US ones. With that in mind, multiple languages should be built into your games (Spanish, German, French are the big ones). The US Market hasn't picked up as much as the EU as far as I can tell, though this may change in the future.

The mobile market is very similar to the downloadable and web pc games that most do on this forum. It's becoming oversaturated with crap, so make sure your games stand out. There's many possibilities for groundbreaking genres and the development costs and time aren't too bad. Even though phones are moving towards 3d graphics I don't see 2d being phased out anytime soon due to the nature of the beast. Simple addictive well polished games will always sell. Hope this helps.

- Dustin Hubbard