Mobitween bought by Zed

Every reader of this blog will have realized for some time that I am a fan of mobile Flash and the good folks at Mobitween (just see here and here), the mobile Flash pioneers from Paris. And, boy, would I have wanted to work with them some more but, alas, it seems this will remain wishful thinking as they have been the first prey of D2C giant's Zed M&A fund: yes, they have been acquired.

The deal - unfortunately for me, I guess - makes a lot of sense to Zed, who have been raising their revenue numbers to heights so dizzying they would nearly make the initial investments comprehensible... (if only the initial investors had seen anything of that success; but well...): Zed famously claims to make up to 85% of their revenue with

 predominantly in-house produced generic content, and when it comes to speed and efficiency, mobile flash in general and the guys at Mobitween in particular have no match.

So, well done them, and let's hope Flash will continue to roll as it started to promise, so that we can all marvel at dramatically reduced time to market and, consequently, hopefully a vastly improved content offering all around (oh, and buy Zed shares if you can).

News Flash (Lite)

A while ago, I blogged about a cool new site French company Mobitween had launched, namely on user-generated games. Now, the good folks are a bridgehead in mobile Flash (they had their fingers in the code more or less from day 1). So, where is Flash Lite today?

Here's the install base numbers as recently released:

From just over 14% to 23% in a year (yes, I know, this is based on a flat 2 bn handsets out there)... In any event, that is rather respectable, don't you think?

Flash has the great advantage that its graphics are vector-based and therefore scalable. This means that most of the porting nightmare that contributes to 30-50% of the cost of mobile games, etc would fall away. Nice thought... It would make the whole commercial model of mobile games dramatically rosier. And it appears to be gaining traction: e.g. does Adobe make Flash Lite available on Verizon phones (and I've been told - confidentially - of one publisher having recorded more than 2m Flash game downloads on there already).

Flash is particularly good for casual games, which is, as everyone close(-ish) to mobile games knows, all the hype for the (small) mobile screen, and rightly so, as it is normally easier to adapt a casual game to the screen limitations (not even starting to talk about processing power) that are inherent to mobile phones. A natural fit, huh? Just look what Mobitween and their users have come up with! And I don't even get started on Atom/Shockwave (read an interview here) and all the others out there...

Is it then that we only need to wait until Flash Lite (finally) reaches the mass market? On the web, Flash hurt Sun's Java badly. Will the same happen on mobile? Or will Sun be smarter this time, and make sure that its currently dominant position will be reinforced by making it easier for developers to publish on their platform? The jury is out...

Games 2.0: UGG (or user-generated games)

The wonderful guys from French Flash specialists Mobitween launched a user-generated-games portal called ugenGames. Here's the PR blurb: "The site invites players, developers and designers to create, upload, customise and share web and mobile Flash-based games. It also offers the chance to personalise and share games with others players by embedding them into social websites such as Facebook and MySpace or blogs like Blogger and Wordpress."

Mobitween's CEO, Philippe Chassany, reckons that this approach "bridges the gap between web and mobile game developers and players allowing them to create, customise, embed and share an endless library of games".

The concept is intriguing: basic casual game engines that can - because all done in Flash - be easily customized even by amateurs. Moreover: as the creator can adapt screen sizes, you can also choose to have it output in Flash Lite flavour - suitable for higher-end mobile phones! It is a rather sweet accompaniment to the 2.0 revolution.

However, will Flash Lite become J2ME's nemesis and revolutionize mobile gaming? Probably not just yet but the potential would certainly appear to be there: with over 200m enabled devices it is no match to the other technologies around but it is reaching a size where development for it might make a lot of sense: it is faster and cheaper than J2ME or BREW (last but not least because the porting nightmare falls away due to the vector-graphics approach used by Flash). Given that the limitations of input via mobile handsets limit the complexity of game play anyhow, the inherent limitations of Flash might not actually be too much of an impediment. Interesting...