October 2007

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by Alexander Smith, mobile gaming enthusiast

In the multi-billion dollar videogame industry, mobile phone games are rather misunderstood. They’re unlike the regular boxed products where people walk into a store and take the game off the shelf—mobile games have distribution through telecom channels—yet that hasn’t kept mobile games from becoming a billion dollar industry in their own right.

Electronic Arts, the world’s largest games publisher, was so convinced by the necessity of mobile that, in 2006, they purchased Jamdat (now EA Mobile) for some $680 million. French rival Ubisoft started their own mobile division—called Gameloft—in 1999, and it will post a projected $130m in consolidated revenues this year.

But a new start-up based in London, England could upset the apple-cart. This week saw the announcement of what is tantamount to a new platform—a new way to get games on your phone. And development for the platform begins now, whilst the public can start to use it in December.

“…what is tantamountto a new platform…”

Internally speaking, the company is focused on what chief executive Chris Pelly refers to as “The enormous success of user-generated content and social networking sites [which] reflects the universal needs of self-expression and identifying with others.”

And there’s a strong case for that. Personalised recommendations for users, game creation tools so that anyone can make a game in a few minutes, rich social networking… The business world of today understands the power of MySpace and YouTube. And to jumpstart this new community, Playyoo is offering $40,000 in prize money for the most successful user created titles.

But what just might put Playyoo’s new platform on the map are free games for mobile users. Most cell phone users are hesitant to rack up charges to their monthly bills—particularly when it’s a company-issued device. Without that costly barrier to entry, cell phone owners everywhere are far more likely to give games a whirl.

We’re now in week two of the Playyoo Game Contest, and if $25,000 wasn’t enough to generate some excitement with Flash developers, we’ve got a second contest going — this time with the Flash Lite User Groups. It’s called the 2007 Flash Lite Game Contest. We’re offering an additional $15,000 in cash prizes and our friends at Adobe and O’Reilly are chipping in other great prizes (Adobe software, anyone?) exclusively to members of regional Flash Lite User Groups.

If you were at Adobe Max in Chicago last week, you may have heard Giorgio Natili announce the contest in the Mobile Device UG session, and he’ll be talking about it again in Barcelona on Oct 17.

So how does it work? As a member of a Flash Lite User Group, you can specify your UG regional section (Americas, Europe and Africa, Asia Pacific) when you create an account at Playyoo. Your games will automatically be entered in the Playyoo Game Contest, as well as submitted for consideration in your regional section. So with little to no extra work on your part, you’ve got a whole other way to win.

Each regional section will be run by a contest leader selected from the regional Flash User Groups and will maintain a page on the 2007 Flash Lite Game Contest website, www.mobilecontest.org.

The winners of the regional sections of the 2007 Flash Lite Game Contest will be selected by a panel of judges comprised of representatives from Playyoo and Adobe, as well as leading Flash Lite game developers worldwide. So while the judging of the Playyoo Games Contest is strictly democratic, the UG contest will be judged by experts based on innovation in concept, game-play graphics, and the technical merits of the game – like memory optimization and loading times.

The prizes for each of the 3 regional sections of the 2007 Flash Lite Game Contest are:

• 1st prize: A prize of YOUR choice valued up to $5,000 USD
• 2nd prize: Adobe software licenses
• 3rd prize: O’Reilly books

And stay tuned in, as we’ll be announcing additional prizes as time goes on. As for the other nuts and bolts: games must be uploaded to the Playyoo website before 23:59 CET February 15, 2008 to be eligible for consideration, and you can submit as many games as you wish.

Check out www.mobilecontest.org for more details on the rules and regulations for theUG contest.

We just wanted to post a quick note to let you know that the Playyoo blog will not only feature updates on the contest, answers to your technical questions, and information about the official launch.

The Playyoo blog will also feature guest content, editorial, interviews with notable developers, gamers and bloggers, as well as industry news, events and discussions.

If you have any requests, suggestions, or ideas, please email them to us, info [at] playyoo [dot] com

If you’re unlucky enough to get the message “sorry, your phone is not compatible with Playyoo” when you try out our preview site, we really are sorry. Playyoo requires a phone which supports the new Flash Lite technology from Adobe, and although this supported by more and more mobile phones, so far the majority of phones, especially older ones, are not compatible.

So, if we know this, why did we choose to bet on Flash Lite? Well, Flash Lite allows us to do some very cool things. More to the point, is allows us to let YOU do some very cool things, as you will discover when we launch in December. The only real alternative technology, Java, is simply not in the same league. Sure, people create great games in Java, but they take a huge investment in time and education.

Flash Lite is building a momentum. Adobe is fully behind it – Adobe was a principal sponsor of this year’s major mobile phone tradeshow, 3GSM, and this alone is a clear indication of how seriously they take the market. Back in March, when we decided to go with Flash Lite, maybe 1 in 20 phones in use in Europe and USA were compatible. Now it is closer to 1 in 10. In the Far East the situation is considerably better.

So if your phone doesn’t work, what can you do about it? Well, to be honest, not so much. Phones are not PCs. You cannot, in general add a Flash player to your phone. Note that while you might find a Flash Lite player you can install, doing it this way in almost all cases will not help, because the phone’s operating software will not be aware of it. The only way in which you can upgrade your phone to support Flash Lite is through a firmware upgrade, and let’s be honest, few phone manufacturers bother much with these, except in extreme circumstances, and even fewer customers apply them. And why should they? It’s a phone, not a PC, and only too often they’ve see what “upgrades” do to their PCs.

So what is the solution? Well, the best thing is to check with your operator and see if you qualify for a free upgrade. At the moment, the safest bet is to choose a Nokia phone, but you can also check various resources (see our FAQ) for a list of supported devices. We’ll be adding a lot more resources on this topic soon.

Actually, if your phone doesn’t work, you’re in good company – my personal phone, a very nice Sony Ericsson K810i, doesn’t either! By the time we go live in December I’ll be making sure have a Flash Lite enabled phone – I hope you can to!

Wow, it’s been a busy few days since we launched the Playyoo preview site and games contest. We’ve had great interest from the Flash Lite developer community at MAX Chicago. Next stop MAX Barcelona in a couple of weeks. We’ve had people try the sneak preview in 31 countries in two days. Today Playyoo returns about 16,000 results on Google. Take a bow Brian Solis and his team at Future Works PR in San Francisco!

We are building our team here at Playyoo to get ready for the December release of our full service. That means getting ready to build our community of users, both players and developers. If you are excited about Playyoo and think you can contribute, drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you - confidentiality assured!

Chris Pelly, CEO Playyoo Limited