Gaming giant Electronic Arts will boost production of video games for mobile phones over the next nine months, bringing top-selling franchises "Fifa Football" and "The Sims" to handsets, the company said Thursday.
By mid-2005, EA will offer for download four mobile-phone game titles sold through most major mobile-phone operators in Europe, North America and Latin America, including Germany's T-Mobile, Britain's Vodafone and America's Verizon Wireless.
The company said in coming years it expects to sell mobile-phone versions of its top-selling titles in the Java and Brew programming languages.
Compared to the booming video game business, the market for mobile-phone gaming, estimated by consultants at $1 billion this year, has been slow to take off as consumers have been forced to settle for simpler games often with inferior graphics.
And handset design has proved to be less than ideal for zapping alien invaders or sinking a game-winning putt. As a result, top-flight publishers such as EA have adapted few of their titles for phones.
Big potential
Last year, EA began testing the mobile waters just as rival publishers Eidos, Ubisoft and THQ Inc. began sinking more money of their own into development.
EA partnered with London-based mobile games network operator Digital Bridges to sell "Fifa Football" and "Tiger Woods PGA Tour" downloads to handset owners for $5, five euros or five pounds a pop, depending on the market.
"In the past 18 months, we've sold one million downloads. That was enough for us to know that the market has potential," said Gerhard Florin, Europe, Middle East and Africa managing director and senior vice president of Electronic Arts.
He said it would be take at least two years for the sale of mobile games to make a meaningful impact on the company's bottom line.
But he noted the potential for the market is strong as more sophisticated handsets with larger memory capacity and colour screens are developed to handle gaming.
The decision by EA to use its vast development teams to create its own mobile games is the kind of boost the industry needs to push the nascent market into the mainstream. "When you look at the big picture almost everyone sees the mobile-phone market as having fantastic potential," said Ben Keen, an analyst with media consultancy Screen Digest.
"What this market needs is a big publisher to step up with its own dedicated team to specialise in this. That's what operators are desperate for: quality. They are getting far too much rubbish."
Digital Bridges will work with EA to develop the network for mobile gameplay and work with operators to sell the games, the companies said.
