January 1st, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »
Metaflow is one of those companies that differentiates itself by being a service provider with a product offering that hasn’t got any real competition in the market. Charles Mcleod brought us his vision on what
2010 will be.
The Market in 2009
2009 was a challenging year for us and many of our clients who implemented widespread job cuts and off shoring of roles wherever possible. Publishers continued to find trading conditions harsh with further cross publisher deals occurring (Namco’s J2ME business through EA for example), some liquidations (PlayerOne, In-Fusio) and growing smartphone excitement and support, indicating that J2ME had most likely peaked.
There are also still too many parties in the value chain between the developer/publisher and sales channels. This is eating into margins where the business model continues to be submitting content to put live on deck. There continues to be few unifying standards and low visibility on real time sales /downloads across multiple channels which publishers must have to effectively run their businesses. increasingly direct sales channels which do not provide a clear ROI are being dropped and pushed to willing aggregators who benefit from many to one deliveries.
In the final quarter of the year, Metaflow won the ‘Best Games Service Provider’ category at the Mobile Entertainment Annual awards in London. We were delighted to win this awards as it reflects four years of working hand in hand with the majority of publishers in the industry.
The Market in 2010
We expect Android to make a big splash after the first quarter with more of the scheduled devices hitting the streets and more sales channels asking for smartphone content. Java will continue to be the most popular downloadable content type, although only the ultra proficient parties in development and deployment will chose to continue to service this area and probably not with the volume of titles seen in the previous years.
More application stores and more parties/platforms supporting all downloadable content types will appear and these all need feeding with content, currently via a legacy push model. Cross carrier /portal visibility of download numbers for forecasting will still remain an issue, especially in EMEA, D2C will grow as CPs pull consumer with more advanced devices in through direct marketing and search based discovery.
Metaflow in 2010
We will begin to commercially roll out multi content type support (Android, Blackberry native, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Flash etc) in our industry leading content submissions client and provide the submissions capability to push these content types to their major revenue generating channels here in Europe and in the USA.
The full commercial launch of Metaflow’s B2B Marketplace in Q1 will forge a new way of interacting with sales channels B2B, including relevant application search and discovery of what is available both now and in the future in terms of device coverage, platforms, languages, videos, demos and so on.
Later in the year we will release the capability to stock marketplaces and channels using our ingestion standard via a more automated technical delivery (as opposed to the classic package, submit and stocking process used today). Our ingestion standard will also enable an industry standard communications API allowing a Content Providers to see a single dashboard picture of submissions /download states for titles across multiple sales channels that have integrated using Metaflow’s standards
