INTERVIEW: SPIL Games (Part Two)

CG.biz was lucky enough to sit down with new chief commercial officer Sidney Mock to talk about how his firm got there, and where it hopes to go next.

In the second part of this three part interview, Mock talks about the perception of casual games in the games media, the ‘walled gardens’ of the console platforms and the problems with the Apple App Store .

CasualGaming.biz: An interesting element of the success seen by brands like SPIL is that much of the wider games press doesn’t recognise it. So much of the games press is rooted in the consoles and core gaming, with casual gaming something that is happening somewhere else out there in the wider world. Does that concern you?

Sidney Mock: I’m fairly new to the industry so I don’t want to be rude to any particular sectors! On a conceptual level there are two things. Firstly, the consumer has X amount of time to amuse him or herself. Some have 30 minutes, some have two hours. People can then choose between different forms of entertainment. You might choose playing football with your friends, or watching a soap opera, or shopping, or playing games.

The first step for the entire games industry is getting people to play games, whatever the category. That’s where we’ve seen a huge shift in entertainment. Zooming in on gaming, I think there will be in the future less importance placed on the device you will use to play a game. It will be more about the content. Whether it’s a console or a handheld or a laptop or a smartphone – whether you’re in a car burning ten minutes going online with your phone or with your friends at home playing for two hours on a console. Companies should be looking to all platforms.

Consoles are increasingly going online, though of course there are the walled-gardens of consoles to contend with, though they will probably open in the long term. In gaming you’re seeing a lot of convergence. A title on Xbox may cost $10m or $20m to develop, but you can’t compare that with a Flash game. What you are seeing is companies like Sony promoting new titles for formats like the PSP or PS3 with an online Flash game which they use to attract people to the main version. You’ll see all these types of games coming together, but you can’t compare Killzone 2 to a Flash game.

CG: You’re right in saying that the big console platform holders are making more movement into the casual space. You mention the ‘walled gardens’. Is there a sense that SPIL and companies like you would like to get involved in consoles to a greater extent but the control yielded by the platform holders mean that you’re better off doing your own thing?

SM: Yeah. In the early days of the internet some ISPs did the same thing. You could go online but the ISP decided which websites you could or could not visit, but over time it proved unworkable. We saw the same thing on mobiles, where telecoms providers decided what content you could or could not access.

CG: That’s still happening. My current phone won’t let me stream video from some websites as my provider wants me to access content through their own portal. At a price, I’d like to add.

SM: You see it in so many industries. It will involve over time. There are good reasons to keep the walls for now. A lot of investment has been made by these companies and they need to make their money back before they can open up their platforms.

CG: Do you see any noticeable trends in the type of games that are becoming increasingly popular and that you’re adding resource to?

SM: We’ve seen a whole movement in the MMO world from the downloadable MMOs to browser-based MMOs, and I think that shows that those types of games are becoming more mainstream. There’s of course a massive audience for that type of game, but traditionally they are hardcore players. But the mass audience is turning to MMO.

CG: Is that a field you guys can see yourselves heading towards more?

SM: Yes. We are offering more and more of these types of games. In general the quality of casual games is getting better and better – the quality, the graphics, the gameplay.

CG: Casual games are definitely becoming more complex and technically adept. Do you think there’s a danger of the point might come where this drive pushes casual gaming to the point where it threatens not to be so casual anymore, where it becomes a little too demanding and loses the essence of what the casual market came to it for in the first place?

SM: If the whole game database is like a pyramid you can see at the top end that games are becoming more sophisticated, but the bottom of the pyramid, where you’ll find casual games, is always expanding and is the base of the success of modern gaming. The pyramid as a whole will become bigger and bigger.

CG: When you guys sit down together in your office, delight in the fact that you’re now the biggest and then pick up the white board market and bullet point your priorities for the year ahead, what are you writing?

SM: You want the ones that I can or can’t disclose?

CG: Well, if you want to be frank my pen’s in my hand!

SM: We see [our recent announcement] as a milestone but it’s not the end goal. It’s proved that our strategy is working – nothing more or nothing less. We consider ourselves as a small company. We have 200 people globally. We are not seeing ourselves as a big corporation. This spirit is part of our success. Our management is still very much involved in the company.

This year we want to continue the rollout of our targeted game portals and refine them. In a perfect world we want our target audience that is defined to be 100 per cent matching our portals. Secondly, we want to keep adding quality content from both our partners and our own studios – around five per cent of our games portfolio right now is our own IP.

One of our strategies is to go from generic portals to branded portals, and you will see a lot of experiments going on this year too, particularly on mobile – our vision is to offer casual games regardless of the platform. We’re starting this process in China, trying new features on mobile.

CG: Will this include new brands, too?

SM: Yes. We came from the ‘one size fits all strategy’ and now have three segments. If there is a target audience that we don’t target specifically right now then we will try to.

CG: On the topic of mobile, the iPhone has been a huge success. Are you guys looking more specifically at what you can do there?

SM: Like everyone, we are looking it, the same way we are looking at IPTV and other new tech. The App Store is a great success, but it’s increasingly built on hits, and I’m not sure if we want to be in a hits driven marketplace. There are companies who are very good at leveraging this method, but we’re good at other things. I like the iPhone, and iPhone users are over-performing on mobile internet use. The majority of phones have poor internet browsers, and we want to target the mass market, so we need to tackle that.

Part One of this interview can be seen here.