Part 1 - Player X MD Tony Pearce
Tony Pearce has been in the mobile games industry almost since the outset - starting out at Digital Bridges, now I-Play, before going on to found Player X around two years ago. He took with him to the new company a clear insight into how the industry's distribution works, and how to deal with operators and publishers alike - and found a niche for Player X just in time, as operators began to close their doors on new content providers.
Now Player X is a publisher in its own right, having evolved from its original roots in distribution, and its mass-market focused titles regularly feature in the mobile download charts both in the UK and elsewhere.
"We started Player X up as a distribution company, basically acting as the gateway for people who couldn't get their content into operators," Pearce explains. "That was the initial idea. The long-term idea was always to become a publisher, but at the beginning, we couldn't just go to Universal and get Miami Vice, for instance.
"We had to build up the business by becoming a good quality distributor and actually selling other people's games and earning a small revenue share from that. The first year was all about creating very strong distribution, and then building up the distributor catalogue to a point where we had enough cash to actually start doing games ourselves.
"For the first six months, all we did was close the contracts - and in hindsight, that's the best thing we've ever done, because the doors are now pretty firmly shut when it comes to any content provider trying to get their content into an operator. We now supply over a hundred operators globally - and we're direct, with our own contract, to about 85 of those. We're not direct in places like Russia and India, where we go through a third party."
The firm made the move into publishing with a number of major licensing deals, and is now partnered with some of the biggest IP holders in the UK - and, indeed, in the world. Among its license partners are Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman, movie studio Universal, UK TV network ITV, toy maker Hornby, translation and language learning firm Berlitz and, on the mobile video front, the English football Premiership.
"We've got games out there which are outselling some of the bigger publishers, and we've got to this point in a short space of time and on relatively short funding," says Pearce. "I think that's a key thing. A lot of the big super-publishers have really big investment behind them - GBP 30 million plus - and our funding was absolutely nothing compared to that. And yet, we're up there with those big guns."
One of the biggest deals which the company has done in the UK, and arguably the most important in terms of building its impressive casual gaming portfolio, is the deal it struck with ITV. Many of ITV's hugely popular TV game shows have been converted into mobile games by Player X - a move which Pearce believes taps into a mainstream audience for mobile gaming.
"We initially just did a couple of games with ITV, which were I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and ITV Celebrity Wrestling," he explains, "but we're now ITV's number one partner for games, under the ITV Play brand. That's a new channel which they've launched on cable, which is being pushed very heavily - it's effectively a channel for game shows, and it's being upsold by the other channels as the place to go for that content."
"Related to that, you've got the ITV mobile site - which is actually really good. It's fantastic quality, really up there with any of the top Vodafone Live portals. The games section of that has all of their big game shows - so for example, if you click on The Price Is Right on that portal, it goes through to the games section, and everything on there is one of our products. All the content in there is Player X content, so this is a really big deal for us."
Another key area for casual gaming is gambling games - and Player X is a pioneer in this field in the UK. The company has taken advantage of the UK's relatively permissive gambling laws and launched a real money mobile gaming service, which offers a variety of games linked to a central account and has proved to be an enormous hit for the firm.
"We're the first company to launch real money, gambling casino games - like Roulette, Blackjack, and so on," says Pearce. "They're going exceptionally well - on O2, they're one of the biggest sites on i-Mode. We work with a company called Probability, and they have the mobile gambling license - what Player X does, is we help develop the games, we have the exclusive distribution rights into all the operators, and we brand it with our own name."
He goes on to explain in more depth how the system works. "When you register, you put in a credit card, and it does an electoral roll lookup to see if you're eighteen or over," he says. "You put in your home address, add some money, and you're off. The minimum bet is 10 pence, maximum bet is anything you want, basically. So for example, in Roulette, I have GBP 39 in my account - I work in 10p chips, and I can put as many of those as I want on a bet, right the way up to 39 pounds."
"You set up your bet on your mobile phone, and when you're done, it does a live spin on the server. The odds are the real odds - you can win quite big money on it, in fact. Also, your bank balance and registration is carried across between all the games, so I can win money on Roulette, quit out, go to Blackjack and spend the money there.
It's very consumer-friendly - and if you win and want to cash out, you can do that through the interface on the phone. We'll send you a cheque for anything up to your total account balance, and if you cash out before four in the afternoon, you get the cheque the following morning."
"It's really good quality stuff," he continues, "and we're starting to roll this out internationally. Telefonica are interested in it, and we'll sell it in whichever countries have laws that actually permit gambling."
Tony Pearce is managing director for Player X. Interview by Rob Fahey. Visit MobileIndustry.biz next week to read the second part of this feature.