INTERVIEW: Easy as MTV

MTV may be best known for being a goliath in the wolrd of music television (and the object of one of the most cringeworthy Dire Straits lyrics of all time), but in recent times, the conglomerate’s attention has turned to video games in a big way. And no area of interactive entertainment has got more love from the firm than casual games.

It got the ball rolling by snapping up Atom Entertainment in August, 2006 for $200 million, picking up Shockwave.com and Addictinggames.com – along with a combined casual games audience of 50 million.

The following year, the firm announced it was to pump $500 million in video games, following its acquisition of Guitar Hero and Rock Band developer Harmonix.

Salmi tells CasualGaming.biz that there’s more to come very soon…

You were involved in casual gaming early on in its lifecycle. How do you see the market growing, and which area will end up being the most successful?

We’ve been doing casual gaming since when it first really started getting popular in 2001 – 2002. We were probably one of the first if not the first company to actually start selling these games. IT was all about downloadable games that you bought for $20. That was the original market, and it’s still around – and there are subscription models and item-based sales, virtual worlds and games communities. Subscription, download sales and item sales.

But the big story now is advertising has really come on in the last year – particularly in the last six months. Advertisers have understood that a huge percentage of people are playing games on the internet and spending a lot of time playing them.

They think: “Wow! I’ve got to get my message in front of these consumers.” It was an uphill battle for me to get advertisers on board in the early days – even though we saw the number of people playing games through Shockwave.

We’d be in ad meetings telling people: “You don’t understand. 16 to 18-year old boys that you can’t reach through any other way are goofing off at school, doing their homework in the room away from the PlayStation are playing these games. And early 20-year olds at work – these guys are just twitching to play a game in their lunch hour and they find them online.”

Now advertisers do understand that, and we’re seeing a tremendous uplift in that business. Advertising will be driving a lot of the casual games we see as we move forward.

Since those days, the likes of EA, Take Two and numerous other established publishers have set up their own casual divisions. Does your history give you a significant advantage?

EA, Take Two, Activision; our history gives us an absolute advantage on these guys in this space. These guys never sold [in-game] ads. For them to set up advertising connections is a huge challenge, and even if they manage to get past that struggle, we have a huge advantage that we sell across platforms.

If a company wants to buy a certain number of advertising, they’ll buy across television, internet, causal games and mobile. We have an interesting offer to make – and we have a very large, established sales force. We all know that working in the US, Japan, UK and more, we have a sales force that is highly respected and seen as a leader. For those companies trying to do that from scratch? Good luck, basically.

Do you have any concerns that likes of Activision and EA will challenge your position and reputation when it comes to Flash games?

No. There’s plenty of room for people to get into this market – it’s growing all the time. Hopefully they’ll push all of us to produce better and attractive games. But people aren’t going to pay for Flash games, because they’re very much throwaway titles. It all goes back to advertising. The companies you mention can build a great game, but can they actually make any money out of it? That’s the bigger question.

Where do you see digital distribution going in the future – and is the traditional retail box model under threat?

I do think it’s under threat. With things like Xbox Live, we’re aware that the console model is becoming more reliant on digital downloads. There’s a clear pathway there that the box is not going to be of much value. The question then is: where is that retail experience going to be? Is it going to be things like Marketplace on Xbox Live – probably yes. Is it also going to be directly from the likes of Amazon or MTV? From our perspective, some of our properties we may sell, but we’ll let everyone sell them. We never want to be proprietary about where our products are sold.

Are there any gaps in the MTV portfolio you’re looking to address?

I don’t think we’ve done a tremendous amount in mobile games. The business has been up and down. We’re pushing hard with Shockwave and Flash gaming, but we’ve taken a different approach to mobile. We have a South Park game and a Spongebob game. We’re not doing anything wrong, but we haven’t yet been hyper aggressive in that category.