February 11th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »
Glu seems to be committed to launching many more mobile games focused at various smartphone platforms. The company will devote 30 to 40% of it's development time at it.
“With our recent restructuring activities behind us, we stand well situated to implement a more aggressive publishing strategy for the next generation handsets, such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry and N-Gage, while continuing to deliver the best games for the traditional carrier market. ” said Greg Ballard, Glu’s chief executive officer, in the closing statement of the company's latest financial report. “We are committed to operating our business with a focus on revenue and expense alignment and believe that we will exit 2009 with a stronger and more diversified publishing platform and stronger partnerships with our key licensing partners.”
During the earnings call, he revealed that the company is prepared to devote up to 40% of it's development power to the rising smartphone platforms (N-Gage, Blackberry, iPhone and Android). If one-person developers and small game shops can be successful on the platform, so should Glu.
Greg estimates that the power of the app store is so big, that even with a single digit market share, a company can be profitable on a product in 2009. Companies that stay focussed at this opportunity will manage to become increasingly successful whereas companies that lack the resources to stay in, will probably play a less important role, much like the carrier decks evolved.
Greg also sees change in the operator market. With the App Store and Android Market providing high kickbacks to the publishers, operators slowly start to increase their revenues as well. Another benefit to the current market situation will be that there are even less players to share the market with.
When it comes to brands vs. original IP, Greg explains that Glu will be publishing more original IP. Specially for the iPhone. The iPhone is even expected to have less brands on it then other (smartphone) platforms. This is partly because Glu's licensor's held back iPhone rights in a lot of cases.
