Q&A: Blue Lava Wireless: One Million Served

Electronic Gaming Business, March 10, 2004

Blue Lava Wireless ( http://www.bluelavawireless.com ), maker of perennial mobile hit Tetris, recently sold its one millionth cell phone game. The 20-person company based in Honolulu offers a dozen titles, about half of which turn a profit, says president Henk Rogers. In our conversation with Rogers to mark this milestone he discussed how Blue Lava is about to make multi-player mobile gaming palatable to players as well as the ways in which wireless gaming needs to grow up.

EGB: What share of the million games you've sold were Tetris?

Rogers: Over 80% of that is Tetris, so we'll be hitting the million copy mark for Tetris probably next month.

EGB: How are you making head-to-head mobile gaming more appealing for players?

Rogers: We are about to be release Tetris Battle. When you want to play a game against another player the client application goes to our server and finds a game that's recently been played by someone else, and it sends that game record to you and you go head to head against that player. If you complete the game, win or lose, the client sends your game back to the server and that will be sent to someone else again. That way we eliminate the latency problem. The second problem is people dropping out. We eliminate that annoying aspect of multiplayer by making the games pre-recorded.

EGB: It is still hard for mobile gamers to find and find out about phone games? Doesn't marketing on the part of carriers need to evolve substantially in this segment?

Rogers: Absolutely. The business is still in its infancy. In Japan and Korea you find dedicated magazines to mobile gaming, and that's how people find out about them. Once those magazines appear here, this will become a much more normal business. It's not a distribution issue. Once the market grows up there are other media that kick in. Maybe Sprint or Verizon should do a magazine and send it to their users. They need to do something like that and it's not clear to me that they understand that. They're new at this, and they are over their heads. They are doing it through people who are coming from the companies rather than from the game industries. They are not leaning on a lot of experience. It feels like they are understaffed and they are understaffed with people who have actual experience in the game industry.

EGB: There is an argument that the U.S. gamer will not game in the same ways as in Korean and Japanese markets.

Rogers: Everybody says that, but if you look at the history of GameBoy, the users in the various markets are not that different. Pokemon and Tetris do equally well in all of the territories. The basic user is playing basically the same kind of games.

EGB: How has the mobile gaming business changed in the last year?

Rogers: I believe that more publishers understand the need for more quality. We think that when somebody buys one of our games we don't only have the responsibility to give them their money's worth but we have a responsibility to the industry to educate the people that you can play games that are fun and nice to look at on mobile phones. The problem comes when somebody spends $4.99 and buys something that they play for five minutes and decide they won't play games on the phone. They've killed that person for everybody. For us to get that person back is tough. Everybody is doing a lot of growing up. At the very beginning anything sells because it's vacuum. It's not a vacuum now, and now the problem is differentiation. People are starting to understand they can't put out a product that is designed just to get people to download and not care what happens to them afterwards. Those kinds of products are going to go away.

EGB: Is the company profitable? And what does it take to make a mobile game company profitable? Do you put 10 products out to make money on a few?

Rogers: Yes, we are profitable. You have to have a couple of games in the top 20. There are a lot of people in the industry who have VC money who are spending money in places that they shouldn't be spending money in yet. Being number one right now isn't a big deal. It may be for a VC, but it's not going to be two years down the line when no one remembers who was number one two years ago. If you are spending a serious amount on marketing then you are wasting a serious amount of money. We're trying to grow organically, so we're very careful.

EGB: Do you think the economy is being skewed by VC money investing a lot in marketing and pushing titles?

Rogers: I think it is panning out that even the marketing money isn't going to push your titles to number one. We've done almost no marketing on Tetris. I don't see much marketing for Jamdat Bowling, and it's number two.

EGB: Where do you think money is being wasted?

Rogers: Spending huge amounts of money getting Lord of the Rings and Tiger Woods. Buying huge IPs that aren't panning out yet. It's a little too early.

EGB: But don't they argue back that you need name recognition in the arena right now? When you are thinking about which brands to attach yourself to in order to get consumer recognition, why choose a Tetris over a Tiger Woods?