Inside Asian Gaming

March 2008 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 21 Mobile Gaming “When you’re operating in markets where the consumer base is growing at ten million to 15 million consumers per month, you also have to think about who you’re aiming at. “Who is your target customer? Are you going for a young audience or a more mature one? Sooner or later most people across Asia will have a mobile phone and/or a PC. “Some companies are willing to sign up any licensee. We have chosen to focus on a very select and very few licensees but deliver to them high quality entertainment and games,” says Mr Naik. “CryptoLogic is very strong today in games of chance, casual and role playing games and new and emerging products. “We can bundle products and we can deliver to PC, to mobile, to console, to cable and probably to a few more platforms in the next few years.” Just as the old divisions between the offline and online worlds are being pushed back by wireless handset technology allowing players to remain permanently ‘on’, so the divisions between home entertainment and entertainment on the move are also blurring. CryptoLogic has just taken a stake in Mikoishi Studios, a game developer in Singapore that has worked with leading companies including Sega and Capcom. To emphasise how strongly the convergence movement is growing, Mikoishi recently appointed a former CEO of MTV Networks Asia Pacific and a former regional vice president of Electronic Arts as its chairman and CEO respectively. “We’re getting Mikoishi to help us with convergence and to take card games into the casual gaming market,” says Mr Naik. “We’ve also agreed to make an investment in Mahjong Time with a view to combining our two organisations. This effectively puts us right into the mahjong space with both community based play and web 2.0.” “We’re very excited about the Mahjong Time deal for several reasons,” adds Ken Crouse. “One is that mahjong might be the ultimate game for convergence. We’ve all been waiting for the mahjong market to take off for a number of years and we all hear about the hundreds of millions of players that love to play the game in China. It’s a national pastime for a variety of reasons. Some people bet on it for cash like a poker game, and other people play for the community experience. “Oneof our bets onmahjong is not that it’s going to be the game of choice for gamblers, but that it might be so popular with community play that it then creates a space for all the other products.”