EA mobile ups its games

EA recently announced it had secured all the assets of developer and publisher Hands-On Mobile Korea, a subsidiary of San Francisco-based Hands-On Mobile.

Hands-On Mobile develops and distributes mobile content to mobile operators in 60 countries. The purchase does not affect the remainder of the organisation and the Korean studio will be renamed EA Mobile Korea.

The studio is perhaps best known for Korean role-play game Hero’s Lore, the market’s number one mobile game in sales and users.

EA, which has been weak in the RPG sphere to date, will roll out Hero’s Lore 3 this year in Korea, then worldwide. It will also use the Korean business as a development studio for transferring PC-based titles such as Fifa Online onto mobile.

The purchase shows just how bullish EA is on the Asia-Pacific gaming market, a region that the PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook says is the world’s biggest consumer of gaming titles in the world, worth US$11.7 billion in 2006 and forecast to grow at 10 per cent per year.

Mobile gaming is growing in stature, with Gartner estimating in its 2007 report titled More Growth Ahead for Mobile Gaming that as many as 10 per cent of Australian mobile internet subscribers use their mobiles for gaming.

EA’s director of mobile, Asia, Mike McCabe, said demand for mobile games in developed markets, such as Australia and Japan, is strong but that emerging markets were also showing strong growth.

EA is expecting healthy expansion in South Korea, and significant changes in mainland China and India.

These include mobile carrier flexibility, and the opening up of billing systems to allow content providers to sell

off-deck, as telecoms firms realise the importance of quality content.

Mobile games are attractive to developers such as EA as they are cheaper to develop than PC titles and can be used to introduce a mainstream audience to gaming.

They are also attractive to content-hungry mobile operators, and EA has been working closely with China Mobile to expand this part of the carrier’s business.