This is an interview with Tapio Äijälä of Small Planet, who are a leading developer of mobile chat and content delivery products.
Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Tapio. Can you tell us a bit about Small Planet? What is the company background? What do you do?
Small Planet was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland. We were one of the first companies in the whole world to concentrate completely on mobile entertainment. Today our main focus is to develop a mobile content delivery platform called Download Center (DLC) and a mobile chat / community product called MChat. In addition to the product business, during the years we've developed a number of custom-made solutions for our clients. Some of these solutions have been multiplayer games combining Web and mobile aspects (SMS messaging, WAP).
Can you tell us a little about your approach and method to distributing a mobile phone game.
Our DLC product is mainly directed to media companies such as newspaper & magazine publishers, broadcasting companies and to other service providers such as portals. We provide them with a hosted turn-key solution that consists of the software platform, required mobile operator connections and a suitable content package. This way our customers can start distributing and charging for different kinds of mobile content without almost any knowledge of mobile technology. One could say that our customers need to just advertise their mobile content shops and we'll take care of the rest.
In addition to traditional content items like logos and ring tones, our content offering includes nowadays colorful wallpapers, polyphonic ring tones and naturally downloadable Java games & other client-side software as well. We don't develop content by ourselves but aggregate it from 3rd party partners.
Mobile phone games can be basic, so what do you see being possible in future, say five years from now.
We believe at that stage mobile gaming will have established its position as a "normal" way of gaming, just like computer and console gaming have already done. Mobility will add a whole new dimension to hand-held gaming and enable new innovative and creative gaming concepts. One can think of for example about the possibilities of combining games with positioning technology. Mobile phones open also new possibilities for multiplayer gaming.
What is your advice for the wannabe developers trying to get their mobile phone games out to the marketplace?
During the past year or so small mobile game development teams have appeared like mushrooms after rain. From service providers' and consumers' point of view this is of course very favourable as the best games can be chosen from a wide selection. For game developers it means harder times. It gets all the time more and more difficult to stand out from the crowd so that some distributor would get interested in your offering. So, maybe the wisest thing for a game developer start-up is to build a partnership with some established company, either with a bigger game developer or with a some content aggregator.
Negotiations with big players can take surprisingly long time. By working with a partner company that has existing customers and connections frees you from negotiating with more than one company and still you'll games may be sold maybe by tens of operators, content shops etc. For example, we are always interested in adding new quality games to our content portfolio. So, if you think that you got what it takes, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Do you have plans to move into game development.
No. Our experience and knowledge is mainly related to server-side environments and enabling technologies. Developing a good game is a very demanding task and we are certain that the best games are developed by companies that are totally focused on that. We will instead continue to work on our Download Center product & related service offering and make sure that it's as easy as possible for the consumers to buy & download great games from our customers' services.
Tell me about a game that you could make if the sky was the limit with development and technology.
This is a tricky question. In the past I've played quite a lot of different kinds of strategy games... I think that if someone would release a mobile multiplayer strategy game, I would definitely want to play it. It would be even better if the game would be a location based.
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Thanks for answering our questions Tapio and telling us a little more about Small Planet. If you would like to find out more about Small Planet you can visit their website.