Oberon Media: We want to lead the casual space

Oberon Media's senior vice president of publishing, former Xbox Live exec Don Ryan, has told GamesIndustry.biz that the company's in a great position to lead the casual space moving forward by utilising the various cross-platform elements of its business.

In an exclusive interview ahead of his session at this year's Casual Connect conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, he outlined his belief that the evolution of more intuitive user interfaces will drive growth.

"I think 3G as it evolves and you continue to have this evolution of more sophisticated and easy-to-use interfaces to get the casual audiences to the content, I think you'll see the casual audience grow on mobile," he said.

"I think this is what makes Oberon uniquely qualified to drive progress in the adoption of casual games on mobile - if you take all of the publishing assets of Oberon as well as the various platform components, then we can work together with all of our partners as well as carriers to drive those easier interfaces."

He also commented on the departure of I-Play's former CEO David Gosen last month.

"The company decided that we wanted to have a unified publishing strategy to maximise the synergy of all of the recent acquisitions. That was the point of the organisational changes that occurred," he said.

But he did admit that there are still challenges that those working in the mobile space needed to overcome - particularly in terms of breaking down the barriers and getting the message through to consumers.

"One of the key questions that we're trying to answer is how to effectively market to consumers, knowing the limitations of the deck, and also knowing the limitations of the casual buyer," he said.

"Having run a very large online games portal when launching the Xbox Live service, I understand deeply that these consumers don't have any patience for searching through the deck - they really need their portfolio managed carefully.

"But there are still a lot of challenges. This year, the carriers having a very strong hold over the distribution channel, fragmented handsets, the preponderance of licensed brands taking over the deckâ¦but where we get excited is that 3G is still near its tipping point, we feel like the iPhone and the N-Gage is really going to whet people's appetites for downloading content."

Oberon Media is the owner of a number of iTV, mobile and online properties, including UK-based I-Play.