Gameloft has recently found itself in some tricky situations as it attempts to move from its previous paid and premium model into freemium and alternatively funded games.

So it was a good opportunity for Pocket Gamer's Will Wilson to sit down with its SVP of sales and marketing Gonzague De Vallois and discuss how the French publisher was dealing with its own transition.

"Games for everybody - that's always been our motto," De Vallois starts, explaining the background to Gameloft's recent switch.

When smartphones first came out, it made games for what it refers to as 'innovators'.

"We were addressing them mainly through premium games, like Modern Combat, N.O.V.A. and Dungeon Hunter," he says.

"A premium experience at a reasonable price."

Getting softer

Now, however, the smartphone market has become mass market, while the freemium model has exploded.

Gameloft has come in for criticism in terms of how it's tried to shift between these markets.

Perhaps the clearest example is Dungeon Hunter 3, in which it took a high regarded action-RPG franchise and turned it into a wave-based hack-and-slash.

"The game is good. What we did not anticipate very well was the level of expectation ... on the type of gameplay and the freemium model," De Vallois says.

"Maybe we didn't do a good enough job preparing them [fans] for this shift in the franchise. We wanted to spin it off a little - that does not mean we do not want to take it back to its original roots and we are listening to our fans. We owe them a lot in the last two or three years."

All about expectations

Significantly, he says that in markets where the first two premium games weren't released - such as Korea - the reaction to Dungeon Hunter 3 has been very good.

"The mistake we made was our fans expected a real follow-up from the first two titles. In transition periods you need to make tests and that opens up the doors to mistakes. That was one," he concedes.

There was a similar situation when the company reworked its paid Gangstar: Miami Vindication game as the freemium Urban Crime

"We thought the Gangstar-type environment and gameplay could attract a wider audience than it was attracting," De Vallois explains.

"So we had to simplify the gameplay, shorten the missions to adapt to this 'snacking' approach of casual gamers, and try the freemium model so that people could get into it.

"Of course we had the backlash from the original fans, but we should have told them 'It's not for you'.

"If ... you are not a hardcore gamer that's ready to invest so much time and energy in Gangstar, then you can try Urban Crime. You can play for free and find out if you like this kind of experience. "

Talk to me

The point, he argues, is that Gameloft's real failure is a lack of communication.

"Every time we launch something, our [hardcore] fans think that it's for them - of course, because we've been mainly targeting them."

Yet, such is the scope and power of these new business models and audiences, there's no way Gameloft can ignore them.

"It was the same when we launched Let's Golf 3," De Vallois confesses.

"It's a really cool game, but the full price point was somehow killing it. It was not enabling it to reach wider audiences, so that's why we switched to the freemium model, and we're very happy with the switch."

Only way is forward

The result is that the publisher will continue to experiment while trying to improve its communication with fans and better highlighting which games are targeted at which sort of audience.

One thing is for sure, though. The days of single priced games are over.

"There won't be any pure premium," De Vallois says. "For us, there are two lines of business: freemium and paymium. There will always be an opportunity to download new levels etc."