Posts Tagged ‘Greg Ballard’

Glu Mobile chief Greg Ballard said on Tuesday he was cutting both staff and his own salary in response to “increasing economic headwinds facing our industry” amid soft demand for mobile gaming, Reuters reports.

But that runs counter to what EA and Gameloft, the two largest mobile gaming companies, said Wednesday: “Concerning the iPhone, mobiles etc, we are not worried, it’s all going well,” a Gameloft spokeswoman said in the article when asked about fourth-quarter demand.

Meanwhile, Barry Cottle, EA’s mobile business chief, said a fall in handset markets had not hurt the industry. “Mobile games are actually thriving right now,” Cottle said at the ‘Nokia World’ mobile industry conference in Barcelona, according to the report.

Mobile game companies are looking to the iPhone and Nokia’s N-Gage platform to help grow the market next year, according to a Reuters report.

With Apple hoping to have 10 million iPhones on the market fairly soon, and Nokia’s number-one position in worldwide cell phone sales, those two platforms alone to have the potential to provide a real boost to a game publisher’s market share.

Since launching six months ago, Nokia has only pre-loaded its N-Gage service on a few of its top-end handsets, but intends to start putting it on most multimedia phones in the future. Otherwise, consumers have to download the service to their phone, which hasn’t resulted in much traction.

“Merchandising has been a primary pain point for the mobile games industry, and the introduction of new platforms gives consumers a really simple way to discover and download games,” Glu Mobile CEO Greg Ballard told the news service.