Five Questions with David Gosen, CEO, I-play

Authored by Scott Goldberg on June 18, 2007 - 9:38am.

Significant attention came to the mobile games space on May 31st when it was reported that Oberon Media, a massive online games company, acquired mobile game developer and publisher I-play for $110 million (though neither company has officially confirmed that amount). David Gosen, CEO of I-play and now the head of Oberon’s worldwide mobile games business, is a keynote speaker at the upcoming Mobile Games Insider event in Santa Monica, CA on July 10. For more information, please visit www.mobilegamesinsider.com. To set the stage, DMW sat down with Mr Gosen to discuss the current state of the business.

The big news is obviously the Oberon deal. Can you shed some light on that?
Clearly I-play, being a top 4 in the US and in Europe, is a significant player. Having driven the business to profitability, this was a fantastic opportunity for us to take a business that we’ve turned into a mobile entertainment player – not just mobile games but mobile video as well – and get the support from someone like Oberon that gives us significant funding, significant resources, but more importantly gives us that cross-platform positioning. And the combined company becomes somewhat of a unique business that we believe can change the rules of the game.

The triple play across PC, mobile, and TV is where the future is. We believe, and Oberon believes, that casual gaming shouldn’t be delineated by platform. And the consumers of tomorrow are going to want to be entertained across all the screens of choice, and this combination really puts us in a strong position. Not only with consumers, but with carriers and licensors, because imagine a world where a movie comes out or someone has a brand they want to leverage in the casual games space, we can now talk to licensors and tell them they can work with one company to take their brand across all the platforms. At the end of the day, that’s what brand owners want.

The mobile games space is large as is at $3.3 billion, and forecasted to increase to $10 billion by 2009, but why do you think it’s overlooked or underappreciated in terms of the games industry as a whole?
The mobile games market isn’t new anymore. It’s been around for the last 6 or 7 seven years, so it’s not the new kid on the block. It doesn’t have the same sex appeal as streaming movies or streaming music. If you had a choice of talking about David Gosen or Angelina Jolie, I know which one I would talk about.

What it does have, however, is the ability to drive revenues today. Games outsell movies and music in nearly every single market, and what you find is that the industry is really keen to chase the next big thing before it’s really capitalized.

But I think you will see this world change. I think 2007 or 2008 will be the tipping point for mobile gaming and mobile entertainment, driven by the sort of consolidation you saw between Oberon and I-play, and driven by the advent of new technology, the growth of 3G penetration, which makes it far easier to download content.

You’ve also got other major players in the space like EA and Fox, so you’re seeing significant awareness driven into this market.

What does the immediate future of the mobile game space look like? Where will we be in, say, 12-18 months from now?
From our perspective, it’s about putting the consumer as the center of everything that we do. Now, I-play and Oberon has always done that, but together we can really create great focus. And that’s about driving awareness and increasing accessibility.

If you look at mobile gaming today, and we know from research that we’ve done, that in excess of 30% of people don’t even know that they can play a mobile game on their device. And not only that but some recent research by Strategy Analytics shows that for a consumer to download a game in the US there’s a minimum of 17 clicks that they have to make on their device.

So what will happen is you’ll see companies like ourselves driving that awareness as we take our products and really drive the focus on them across the website that Oberon controls and powers, and over time we’ll increase the accessibility to make the purchasing process far easier than it is today.

Today the carriers represent 95% of the revenues, and they will continue to be the majority, but what we can do in our new shape, fashion, and form is really create great awareness and accessibility by working both with the carriers but through establishing a direct consumer market.

The definition of a casual game seems to have outgrown the notion of puzzle games to encompass just about anything, up to and including social networks and virtual worlds. How do you see the mobile platform changing the casual game definition even further?
I always say that casual gaming is a mindset, not a genre. I don’t think a lot of people get that at the moment. There’s a perception that casual gaming is a Jewel Quest or it’s a Zuma or it’s a Tetris. And whilst that may have been true 2 or 3 years ago I think there’s a whole new thinking that has to go behind the word “casual.”

Our view is that to make casual gaming successful, you really have to understand the consumer. And that’s why we’ve coined the phrase “One Thumb Gaming.” I think that really captures what a casual game should be. It means you can play it with one thumb. You don’t have to press multiple buttons to progress through a game.

We say that casual gaming is not console because the market within mobile gaming is very different. 50% of people that play mobile games are women. That’s not the case in console gaming. Casual gaming should hook you in sixty seconds, because we know from our research that people play a mobile game for less than 10 minutes per session.

So if you add all of that together, you can see that casual gaming is about one-thumb, pick-up-and-play, easy-to-play-but-difficult-to-master, and it hooks you quickly. One of things that’s important is educating the market, the journalists, the carriers, etc. The Fast and The Furious, for example, which is one of our most successful franchises and one of the most successful in all of mobile, having done 7 million downloads in just over 3 years, is a casual game, because it’s done with one thumb.

So we’re embarking on this education challenge, if you will, to let people know that casual really is a mindset, not a genre.

Some say this might be the last generation of video game consoles, which perhaps makes the overemphasis on the console war a bit ironic when you consider the lack of attention that a growing platform like mobile gaming has gotten. What do you think of the death of the console? Is it imminent, or will consoles be here a while longer?
I think the death of the console is much exaggerated. I spent five years running Nintendo of Europe, and know there’s a role for the console.

The point, however, is that the device of the future is not the console, it is not the PC, it is not the TV, it is the mobile phone, because the mobile phone is really the ultimate life-support system. It’s the only thing that almost has 100% penetration in the developed world, and even in the underdeveloped world. Not only that, it’s a product that people carry with them virtually 24 hours a day. It’s something that people use not only to communicate through voice, but SMS is a key communication tool. And what’s interesting about SMS is that on average the typical response time for SMS is somewhere between 4 and 6 hours. The average response time for an email, on the other hand, is 1 to 2 days.

My phone’s got a camera, it’s got music, it’s got games, it’s got my organizer, it’s got my phone book, and if I wanted to bring all those individual items separately, I would need a utility belt to house them. And people don’t do that anymore. They want convenience, and they want convergence. And the mobile device is the world’s first proven electronic convergent device that delivers quality product across all of its functionality.

The mobile device will become the entertainment hub of the future, interfacing with the PC, the TV, and the set-top box. And it will all revolve around the mobile phone.

BONUS QUESTION: What phone are you using right now, what mobile do you plan to use a year from now, and what’s your favorite game right now?
I’m using the new Sony Ericsson K810i, which is an ultra-thin mobile phone with a 2 megapixel camera, and I’ve got something like a hundred of my favorite music tracks on it.

The device I expect to be using a year from now? Well, given that I’ve just picked this one up I’m actually quite happy with it. But I think I’d have to go with the Nokia N95, which I think is a really clever piece of kit.

Finally, I’m playing an I-play game of course, and it’s a game called Pillow Fight, a classic piece of original IP, a new genre that demonstrates how innovation in gaming can be successful. I just can’t stop playing it.

Scott Goldberg