Interview

EA's Harrison highlights potential of mobile user generated content

Boom Blox and Spore mobile will lead the swaps

EA's Harrison highlights potential of mobile user generated content
As the head of games for Vodafone, Tim Harrison was one of the big cheeses of the UK mobile gaming industry. Now as director of marketing for EA Europe Mobile, he's even bigger and cheesier (in power, not in physical or odour terms of course!).

We caught up with him for a quick chat during EA Casual's open day this week. Our first question concerned the differences between working for a big, powerful mobile operator and a big powerful games publisher. It was something he neatly sidestepped, instead talking about current trends for the mobile games market.

A surprising example was the future impact of the growing ubiquity of 3G USB sticks for laptops.

"It's an example of how operators are changing their attitude," he argues. "It's not directly linked to gaming, but it will have an impact on problems like data tariffs and the whole 'bill shock' that people get when they look at their bill after downloading a game."

He thinks there been a similar shift thanks to iPhone. "It's bringing consumer electronics into mobile," Harrison says. "And with Nokia launching N-Gage and Google's Android technology on the way, it's changing how people think about their phones."

So despite these occurring, in the main, outside of mobile games, he says there will be a trickle down effect that will be beneficial to the whole industry.

The pace of change is perhaps key however. The bulk of EA's European mobile game sales remain Java-based and while they are growing, the Western European market is generally mature, so growth is steady, not explosive. Harrison says that's why EA is looking to other sectors. "We recently announced our support for smartphones, and we're also seeing strong growth in Eastern Europe and Russia."

As for the specific games EA hopes will do good future business, Harrison has two examples; the Spielberg-inspired Boom Blox and the mobile version of Will Wright's Spore. He's particularly keen to point out that both include user-generated content as a main feature. Players will be able to create their own Boom Blox levels and Spore creatures and upload them to a central server for other players to download.

"The great thing about it is people only use a small amount of data," Harrison says. "It's just a few k to download, which really helps in terms of 'bill shock'. I think having more connected features like this in mobile games will also help with customer expectations in terms of matching the sort of online features we see in consoles games, which up to this point has been difficult for us to do in Europe."
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.