February 17th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »
Stuart Dredge took some time to sit down with Gameloft’s Gonzague de Vallois to talk about the future of the company and its rivalry with former sister company Ubisoft.
Just like other publishers, Gonzague de Vallois sees the J2me and Brew market shrinking though it doesn’t shrink as fast with Gameloft as it does with competitors. He thinks this is mainly the effect the 40 million iPhones in the market have. Gameloft will continue to invest aggressively in smartphones in 2010 but is not abandoning the J2me market yet.
Amongst the smartphone platforms, Gonzague de Vallois thinks 2010 will be an important year for Android as the handset volumes go up. Still the company doesn’t sound really convinced about the quality of the Android Market.
Unlike Glu, Gameloft has always had a large portfolio of own IP based games. Glu will continue to develop new IP and the company will expand their properties not only over the various mobile platforms, but any downloadable games platform.
Gameloft will also take a stronger focus at building up a D2C business instead of the B2B relations they used to have with the operators. As so, Gameloft will keep investing in their social presence on channels like Twitter and Facebook.
Gameloft also isn’t afraid of Ubisoft entering the App Store. The investment of Ubisoft is logical according to Gonzague, but Ubi will have to invest in a large number of titles to get the revenues they expect. Also, he noted that Gameloft’s Assasins Creed is outperforming Assasins Creed II from Ubisoft.
Via.
