EA Mobile believes that brands are only half of the answer in mobile games

Above: Characters in Marvel: Contest of Champions

Image Credit: Kabam

GamesBeat: Quality is this moving bar. Kabam came out very publicly this year and said that they’re going from 16 games released last year to four games this year. They’re moving much higher on the quality bar. If we’re thinking about quality two years from now, what are some of the elements of how much focus on quality has to happen?

Mooney: It’ll increase. My own personal opinion is that we’re headed toward an MMO world, where you expect very rich, very deep systems. The social better be right. The core gameplay better be right. You better not only have regular content, which requires a lot of people to produce at quality, but you’d better be introducing—to go old-school here—expansions on a pretty steady rhythm.

Simpsons, we basically have an event—I believe we have six weeks on, six weeks off as our pattern, and then we have mini-events within it. We find that the audience demands it. They might even take more. That’s a function, with a very large team, of just how much we can produce. That is still worth it. I would do more very comfortably. The numbers and the audience feedback—it’s an art. You have to look at the numbers and be informed on them and check your thinking with them. They’re all saying, “Do even more.” It will be more as well as high quality.

Question: When you’re using IP, are you more likely to spend on marketing, because you want to get the word out and let people know you have this branded game? Or are you more reliant on the IP to drive user acquisition in the existing IP channels when you spend money on it?

Mooney: A major short-term benefit is you get a lot of organic. You get a lot of lift from the brand itself. When you do advertising it’s multiplicative. At least you don’t have to explain why people might be curious about it. I would say that on balance, it helps massively with acquisition if you can hold them. Again, going back to your Mad Max example, my guess is they weren’t holding as much as they liked, so they took more time.

That’s one of the great things about a brand, a big, powerful brand. You get that. Certainly you should expect to get a big uplift off of it early and have a continuing uplift. It helps you make a splash, and if your game’s good enough it will hold and people will keep coming back.

I also think that with reactivation—My own expectation and experience is that I treat a reactivation like an install. Again, it helps, especially if the IP itself is live and doing something new. Treehouse of Horror for Simpsons is a regular reactivator for us. It’s consistently the best over the last three or four years of events. They make a big deal out of it on Fox. We make a big deal out of it in the game. That brings people back. We do reactivation campaigns. It’s very powerful, because you have something new.

A disadvantage of Mad Max is that it’s great to have this huge tentpole. Maybe you’ll have the DVD release, although I honestly don’t think the audience cares about it. But that’s the beauty of episodic TV-related stuff, or trilogies, where you’re getting multiple uplifts. You’re getting a cumulative benefit. I wouldn’t say it’s multiplicative, but you’re getting cumulative, because you get back those people you activated once. They’re more likely to reactivate when the IP has something interesting.

Above: Kim Kardashian’s game for smartphones and tablets.

Image Credit: Glu Mobile

GamesBeat: With the celebrity part of this market, Glu has had some interesting observations about the Kim Kardashian license and those with other celebrities. They say that right now, their reach with these celebrities is about 400 million people on social. By the end of next year they predict that’s going to be 500 million. It’s an interesting way to guide people to think that the potential for your mobile game just gets bigger and bigger with the social reach of these celebrities.

Mooney: That’s true across the network. Games can actually max out. Simpsons has had a couple hundred million installs. SimCity announced recently that SimCity mobile has installed more than all the people who had ever bought a SimCity before. I saw this at Zynga as well. You reach an exhaustion. I was surprised that Hero Charge bought so early, because I would have thought they had other efficient methods of acquisition. I would assume Glu is mostly referring to network effect. They’re also bouncing people around similar games. I’m not confident they’ll keep them all.

GamesBeat: I guess they weren’t worried that they had reached everyone yet. But with signing on some of the people who have this kind of reach, you get some sort of predictability to how many people you can really go after.

Mooney: We’ll see. I’m curious. I don’t know their numbers. It feels like there’s a lot of people in a very similar space that they’ve signed.

GamesBeat: The assumption is that maybe all these people would download a mobile game.

Mooney: Maybe? I’ll make one more comment, and I mean in no way to be critical. There are different ways to do this. My own belief, which is why I voted with my feet to join EA, is that especially when it comes to branded IP: fewer, bigger, better. You want to get into the top 20. That’s a reasonable strategy.

We’ve seen smart companies do a bunch of smaller games and move people around in their network—Storm8, people like that. I think, personally, that the way you get into the top 20—Simpsons, three years in, I think it hit number five at Christmas. That’s remarkable. It’s consistently held in the top 30 over the last year. That’s remarkable for a game that’s three years old in this space, of that sort, with us spending a tiny fraction in paid acquisition compared to our competitors at that level.

We’ll see what happens. Again, I tend to agree with Andrew about fewer, bigger, better in terms of what you launch and push. That’s the way we’re going to win.