Glu Mobile bullish on Windows Phone 8, not HTML5
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FierceMobileContent interviewed Niccolo De Masi, CEO of Glu Mobile, the leading mobile gaming company.
Amongst a wide range of questions he was asked was if there would be a bigger push by the company into Windows Phone 8 gaming to which he responded:
We had something like three of the first 10 games on Windows Phone 7 last year. We’re bullish on Windows Phone 8. In the long term I find it hard to believe that the three largest technology companies in the world, Apple, Google and Microsoft, will not be very significant market share leaders in the smartphone and frankly the laptop, tablet, living room platform wars.
Glu in fact has 4 Xbox Live games in the Windows Phone marketplace, including Bug Village, the first Windows Phone game with in app purchasing. Windows Phone 8 is expected to make it easier for game developers by allowing the use of native code, which should speed up the porting of games from other platforms and make it easier for developers to optimise for performance. Hopefully this means we will see more of Glu’s excellent catalogue on Windows Phone.
When it comes to HTML5-based cross-platform gaming he was however less optimistic, saying:
It’s very early days for HTML5. If you think about the order of it maturing, it’s first going to mature for periodicals, magazines, newspaper-type applications. The Financial Times already moved there and the NYT already moved there.
A year or two beyond that you’ll start to see other simple apps like the Bloomberg financial apps, weather apps, that kind of stuff all makes sense for HTML5. Beyond that, another year or two down the line, you’re going to have simple casual games that are going make sense to be programmed in HTML5.
Glu’s approach is to play at the exact other side of the spectrum here. We build apps that require 100-200-300 megabyte downloadable clients. Things like 3D FPS.
For our style of games, you’re five years away if not 10 years away from being able to deliver a comparable bandwidth and hardware experience using an app model vs. an HTML5 model. We choose to partner and build a style of games that take advantage of the latest hardware.
Read the full interview at FierceMobileContent here.
