Mark van Diggelen’s Casual Games Blog

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SkillPod Media started with its mobile strategy sometime ago and has taken this time to finalise the games content and more so the new mobile games platform that’ll be launched and on offer to publishers from February. More recently SkillPod started with the deployment of its Flash Lite based mobile games into the Nokia Ovi Store, the games have been available for a couple of weeks now and includes 15 of the 40 titles available. The response really hasn’t been bad, says Mark van Diggelen, CEO of SkillPod Media, with some typical superstars enjoying downloads from 55 countries.

There is definitely a purchasing trend towards the handsets that have the Ovi Store links pre-installed on the handsets, such as the new Nokia N97 and 5800. SkillPod has also recently partnered with the new BuzzCity mobile portal Djuzz, which will also be launched in the next week or two as well as the ever popular Australasian mobile portal, Cellmania.com. We’ll add 4 to 5 new titles a month to the Ovi Store and our other mobile partners, adds van Diggelen.

The new mobile games platform will be a feature rich offering and will initially be launched as an internal mobile brand, offering a showcase of the solution and the available games titles. The new SkillPod Mobile Games Platform will allow users to register online or from their mobile handsets, users will have the ability to customise the interface from a selection of skins on offer, they’ll further be able to play the games through their handsets browser, log scores, challenge friends and enter the various tournaments on offer. Users will be able to purchase their favourite games for installation on their handsets, these games will feature local high score logging, for offline gaming fun. SkillPod launched its virtual currency system, Pods, almost 2 years ago whereby users earn and spend Pods when the play certain games, enter tournaments and challenge friends, the Pods system will also be introduced into the Mobile offering.

SkillPod will be launching a number of titles for the ever popular Apple iPhone and it’s baby sister the iPod Touch, titles will also be available for the Blackberry and Android handsets towards the 2nd quarter of 2010. The mobile platform will be made available to publishers as either a white labelled version or through our robust XML solutions, various revenue models are available for publishers to share in the sales of the mobile games.

SkillPod will be offering advertisers and publishers the option to customise, rebrand and/or translate the games for their mobile offerings, thus opening up additional revenue streams for partners.

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Press Release from: http://www.mobimonkey.co.za/issue/4dec09/

Gaming remains a popular pastime for millions of South Africans, both online and on their mobile phones. New trends are constantly emerging that are defining the future, both socially and for marketers. We questioned SkillPod Media’s CEO, Mark van Diggelen, on what the latest buzz is.

SkillPod was started by Mark in March 2004, “I came out of the online casino and poker world and set up various online games solutions while in the industry. These include lottery, bingo and casual games solutions.

SkillPod’s team comprises developers, Adobe Flash developers, designers and webmasters. Mark currently holds the majority shareholding. The other shareholders are Convergence Partners (Chairman of Dimension Data, Andile Ngcaba) and Brabys Financial Services.

1. Tell us about the myths/facts about gaming in South Africa with respect to player demographics/mobile vs. console gaming/the size of online/multiplayer gaming:

Marketers still strongly believe that gamers are teenage boys, whereas 89% of casual gamers are over the age of 30. A female audience dominates the casual gaming market; in the local market, women represent 55% to 60% of the casual gamers, whereas in Europe it’s as high as 75%.

Console gaming is typically a younger male audience, although the Wii is changing this with more families getting involved with playing these games.

It’s difficult to determine the exact size of the local games market, as no formal studies have been done, other than those done at a retail level, which reports on the number of actual product sales. But one just needs to look at all the ad inserts in local publications, walk around the large retail outlets and listen to your friends and family to realise that gaming is incredibly popular locally.

2. How long has SkillPod been “live”?

SkillPod was founded in March 2004. We started in the South African market and now have sites running in the USA, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and India, and we’ll soon be launching in Columbia, Belgium and Indonesia.

The current SkillPod.mobi site is a placeholder for the full-featured mobile games portal, which will be launched in January 2010.

3. What are some of the services you offer?

SkillPod has developed a proprietary online and mobile game platform which allows the syndication of our services and game titles, either through a “white label” offering or through a XML syndication API. We also offer game development, and game customisation and localisation into regional languages for our online, mobile and downloadable game titles.

We package mobile games for many mobile platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Google’s Android mobile platform. This offering will soon be expanded to include the Apple iPhone operating system.

4. With your online and .mobi Flash games services largely being free, how do you generate an income?

We white-label our proprietary games platforms and charge usage fees for the system. Other revenue is derived from custom development, advertising, and from the game development and game customisation.

Additionally, the business generates revenue from users purchasing top-up credits for our virtual currency platform, Pods. Revenue is also derived from users buying the mobile versions and downloading games to their cellphones.

5. Where can one access downloadable games for mobile?

We are on the Nokia Ovi Store and we are also on the Nokia Launchpad program. We will be launching games in the Apple App Store shortly.

Currently, we offer 45 mobile game titles, which are only offered in English, but we’ll soon also be rolling out titles in Russian, Polish, Dutch, Afrikaans and Spanish.

6. What are some of the advantages for companies wishing to use branded games to promote their products?

Game marketing is a cost-effective medium that can be fully customised to meet the objectives of almost any marketing campaign.

Because games can appeal to just about every market segment and age group, this allows effective targeting. An advantage of this form of marketing is that it allows instant feedback in the form of registration, referrals, challenges, high score logging, etc.

7. What are some examples of how branded games could best be used to promote brands?

Here are a few examples of branded game campaigns that we’ve run in the past few months:

Miway
Miway had a driving game developed to promote the new MiDriveStyle vehicle insurance product. The advantage of using a game was that it could be fully customised to behave as the MiDriveStyle product would when installed in the client’s vehicle. The game was linked to a tournament in which participants won LCD televisions, iPods and GPS units.

Volvo
They launched a game to enhance the Volvo Holidays campaign, which focuses on the customising of your car as you prepared for the holiday season.

Huisgenoot and YOU magazines
They launched a weekly comic. The story line of the strip is about a group of friends that are drawn into a world of adventure when they get submerged into an arcade game. A game was developed around the characters and some of their adventures. It is published on the magazines’ websites to offer an additional level of interactivity.

8. What are some of the current trends in gaming (general) in South Africa?

One of the biggest buzzwords at the moment is social media, which leads into social gaming. One just needs to look at your own Facebook newsfeed to see how many people are playing Facebook application games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and many similar social games. Although these are incredibly popular, they tend to have a set shelf life. Games are a way of life and are played to kill time and for relaxation.

South Africans have generally shied away from paying for online content, whereas in the mobile sphere users have generally paid for ringtones, wallpapers, videos and games.

This is because online has primarily been an ad-support business.

Internationally, the approach has been “try before you buy” with users generally being happy to pay for any premium content. This model is being tested in the local market, but will take some time to be accepted as a workable business model that satisfies all concerned.

9. How do these compare to the rest of the world?

Gaming remains big business across the globe, and SA is no exception. We have a number of casual gaming sites that we share with various companies including KTV, Koowee, IOL and 24.com. These sites generally all enjoy high volumes of traffic.

10. What are some of the current trends in mobile gaming in South Africa?

There is a move towards multiplayer mobile games as well as social gaming on the mobile platform.

One of the biggest contributors to the growth is the advent of Flash Lite, a new platform that is being adopted on some high-end smartphones, like the Nokia N97.

These games cost a lot less to develop than the more widely played Java games, so consumers should see games becoming cheaper, if only the cellular networks would reduce their share of the price – they generally take up to 50% of the premium-rate SMS value.

A changing trend could challenge this – with more phone manufacturers launching their own application stores, a trend started by Apple.

Mobile is one of the fastest-growing sectors, so trends change very quickly. Phones are becoming more like portable computers, with faster processors and improved user interfaces and battery life. The new Nokia N97 is a perfect example – it even plays Flash applications in the phone’s browser, something we previously could only do on a desktop or laptop PC.

To play SkillPod games, visit www.skillpod.com (PC) or www.skillpod.mobi on your Nokia N97*.

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