Company Spotlight: Greatelsoft

May 30th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Interviews | 3 Comments »

Today, after a long time, we are starting up our company spotlights again and the honors of the first spotlight in 2007 go to Chinese mobile games developer Greatelsoft where we look at their company and local market with their CEO Gavin Chen.

[Arjan] Can you give us a brief overview of your company and its history?

[Gavin] Our company is formally incorporated in year 2001 in Shanghai, China. Although, at that time, we found mobile gaming was not that popular amongst the rising mobile value added industry, we’ve still been focusing on mobile game development, operation and publishing due to our strong belief on its great potential in the mobile industry.

GTS has produced in total 70 mobile games by the end of 2006, which cover nearly all popular technical platforms, such as JAVA, BREW, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Linux and even WIPI/Doja for the South Korean and Japanese markets respectively.

By the end of year 2006, more than 30 games have been launched with China Mobile. Meanwhile, 25 are in operation with overseas operators and 40 for preload business with cell phone manufacturers. More than 10 millions mobile devices have GTS games embedded up to now.

[Arjan] Supporting that many platforms and so many games, must take a huge skilled team. How many developers are working for GTS?

[Gavin] Currently we have a mature development team of more than 30 colleagues, which is mainly divided into two parts, C based team and JAVA based team. However, in our opinion, the better solution for this problem is cross-platform development engine. Now we’ve developed two cross platform engine with our own IP. For example, when we release a Windows Mobile based game, a Symbian based twin brother will come out soon. By that, the effectiveness of development can be increased in a large extension.

[Arjan] When looking at your portfolio of mobile games, which one do you think it the best and why?

[Gavin] Mainly, we have two product lines, smartphone games and java/feature counterpart. In term of smartphone games, we fully utilize its high performance hardware to bring the users a stunning gaming experience, like Ultimate Speed 3D, which we co-developed with the Intel cooperation by OpenGL ES based hardware 3D accelerating chipset. For the feature phone games, recently we released a casual game ChenXiang, which a big film brand from Chinese film studio and has made a big hit on the market.

[Arjan] In your portfolio, you use a lot of big console and PC titles as part of the mobile title (i.e. Tank Force 2 Gears of War, GR Counter-Strike 2 Source Strike). Does this tactic benefit you?

[Gavin] Yes, we got several big titles from the original licensors or related agency within these two years. These big titles do bring our company good benefits. In China, end users are mostly following local big PC/Film title on the mobile side. However, from our experience, Chinese end user are giving the same attention to those local brands gradually. As I mentioned above, we recently signed the contract with Chinese biggest animation studio

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