May 15th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Distribution | No Comments »
After a few years of trying to establish themselves in the mobile games
market, it seems Konami has now chosen to take an alternative route via
mobile games publisher Glu.
With the deal, Glu establishes an exclusive distribution deal for Konami’s mobile games in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This way, Konami lines up between SEGA Mobile, Activision, Codemasters Mobile and other big PC/Console gaming brands.
Konami itself is originally based in Japan and has been publishing games for over 30 years with big franchises like Metal Gear Solid and Pro Evolution Soccer. Konami will still manage the production and porting of their mobile games catalogue in-house. Konami will launch the first titles in the second half of this year.
“Glu’s reputation and track record of creating hits on mobile made them the partner of choice for bringing our key titles to mobile gamers in these key regions,” said Kunio Neo, president of Konami Digital Entertainment GmbH.
Recently, Glu has been polishing up their catalogue and landed distribution deals with a lot of big name pc/console publishers like SEGA and Codemasters. If we take Glu’s own games in mind as well, in theory they should have no problem to out-grow their biggest rival Gameloft. They didn’t manage to do it to date though. Another problem that Glu might face is cannibalizing the downloads in their catalogue. With many operators switching to select only one game per genre, Glu will have to make the choice to send in a title like Sensible Soccer or Pro Evolution Soccer. Of course, Glu will take the one they expect the most revenue on, but for the publishers in their network it could mean reduction of revenue.
