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Casual Retail: MumboJumbo CEO Mark Cottam on the Benefits of Store Shelves
MC: There's not, really. GS: Fair enough! MC: People can back into it if they look into, on average, how much it costs to produce a physical good, what retail discounts look like, what the average marketing spending is, etc. It is what it is. It's more expensive to conduct business in the retail market than in the download channel. GS: Speaking of retail channels, you had a couple PSP announcements recently, LUXOR and Platypus I believe? MC: Yes. GS: Is this a good time to enter the PSP market? It's not really selling as well as Sony was expecting. Is this the proper time and venue to launch these titles? MC: We've looked at the handheld portable market for some time now. We've watched casual games go from the download arena to mobile to retail, and in every market they've done exceptionally well. We've been looking at the PSP and DS for quite some time and really trying to figure out when the right time is to come to market. We don't know that right now is the right time, but we do know that both Sony and Nintendo are interested in casual games. I think they feel that they belong on these platforms. It's just a matter of getting the right content to the platform. So we're excited about the launch of these titles onto the PSP, and we have additional products already planned for 2007. We're looking at all of the different devices and platforms and working to put casual content on each one of them. As far as Sony, we're very bullish on the opportunity on the PSP, and we think that casual games on the PSP have tremendous growth potential. We think it's going to be a good quarter for Sony and the device. There's a lot of content coming out, and we think that that will benefit everyone in this category. GS: Is there more of a potential market for the PSP over the DS, as far as casual games go right now? Did you specifically choose the PSP over the DS? MC: When we started out at the beginning of the year we wanted to make games for both devices. The process of bringing the games to the PSP just moved along a little bit quicker than on the DS. It was a decision to support our brands across the devices, as opposed to one or the other. As you know, development is not always predictable, so sometimes things occur at a faster pace on one device over another.
GS: Sure, absolutely. Is Puzz Loop's [released in the United States as Magnetica] availability on the DS hindering a port of LUXOR for the system? MC: You know, I don't think so. This is an interesting aspect of casual games. A lot of people ask me how much room there is for multiple games within a specific genre, for example, a match-three? How many different versions of say an action shooter, like a Puzz Loop versus a LUXOR, can you have? And I think that what we've experienced is that there's a huge consumer base out there for casual games, and many consumers are fans of a certain type of games. It's like in the action or hardcore arenas, you have people who will play first-person shooters, or people who will play role-playing games. We're starting to see people within the casual category flock toward a specific genre. There are people who specifically like to play word games, whowon't buy just one word game, but will buy multiple word games. The same is true with match-threes, or derivatives of match-threes. So we think that Puzz Loop being on the DS is not a hindrance to titles like Zuma coming out on the DS. We actually think that consumers will play several games from the same, or similar, genres. GS: So, would you call Zuma and, indeed, LUXOR, games within the same genre to Puzz Loop? MC: I think that Puzz Loop and Zuma are more closely related, in that the shooter is in the middle of the screen and it rotates. If you look at LUXOR, it's different in that the shooter is on the bottom, and it slides back and forth, and while it may seem like a minor difference, it's significant. It changes the play, it changes the feel, it changes the way in which you shoot the ball. So I do think that the three of them are in a similar vein, but there are definitely differences between the strategy and the gameplay, the core mechanic in LUXOR versus the other two.
GS: So it's fair to say that you consider LUXOR and Zuma to be a game within a genre started by Puzz Loop, rather than you guys kind of cloning each other? MC: I think they fall within a genre, which is "action shooter," and each one of them has differences and some variations which make them unique. GS: Let's get sort of businessy here, as far as casual games go. Do you think there's too much VC [venture capital] coming into the casual space right now, and do you think that could adversely affect the market? We've seen an awful lot of new casual games developers and publishers lately. MC: I personally feel that the focus on casual games, the interest in it, whether it's from the media, the investment community or the retailers, is all positive. Like any growing category, there's the risk that expectations are too high and therefore the amount of effort put into it exceeds what's really required, and therefore the results are not what people want. In this case, I feel that VC's investing in the category is a good thing. GS: Can you elaborate on what you just said, as far as too much effort being put into it? MC: A lot of times when there is a growing category, people rush into it looking at it as the next big opportunity. So there's a lot of effort put into it, there's a lot of money dumped into it, there's a lot of product that comes out of it, and sometimes that investment outpaces the demand, and the conclusion is, 'Well, maybe this category isn't as hot as we thought it was.' So I think that's the risk, when you get too much interest in one area and not enough growth to support it. And we've seen this before, where people speculate what the next big growth area is, and then 18 to 24 months later they back off saying, well, maybe it wasn't as big as we thought, when in reality it's a very, very healthy category or segment of the market. So I think that the only risk is that if there's too much focus, if there's too much investment, if there's too much hype, that the category itself may not live up to it. But that's not to say at all that this category won't continue to grow, that we won't continue to see more and more games come out, more and more hits, more and more consumers buying into it. But I like what you said earlier, about not liking the term "casual games?" And that's what it's been labeled as. And we could discuss how it got that name, but I'm not sure how much that matters. We kind of look at it as games for all. On one hand, you have this category of gamers which has been called "core gamers," representing nine percent or ten percent of the population. For everyone else who doesn't want to play those games, casual games are the games that they can play. There's a saying around MumboJumbo that casual gamers don't play hardcore games, but hardcore gamers play casual games. We build games that appeal to a really broad base of consumers. |
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