From Gamasutra, Neil Young, former head of Electronic Arts (EA) Blueprint and Electronic Arts LA has jacked in the high profile job at EA in order to produce iPhone games at his new studio ‘Ngmoco‘.
In the interview he describes the iPhone and App Store as a disruptive element in the ecosystem (my words) which involves several fundamental shifts from the way things have been done in the past.
…more than half the time the average iPhone is in use, it’s being used for something other than making a telephone call. If you think about that concept, that is a fundamental shift.
…from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.
…if you think about what Apple’s doing with the App Store, they’re really turning mobile on its ear. They allow you to control the pricing yourself. They’re taking a distribution fee for distributing your software, but they’re really allowing users to choose what to put on their phone and how they want to enhance their device. And that is a fundamental shift.
The company has three roles:
So commissioning, financing, and producing titles ourselves, that’s the first party. Then there’s the second party, which is looking to the independent developer community and asking ourselves, “What great ideas are out there that need to be funded and financed?”
And lastly, it’s a third party for people who don’t necessarily need our producing experience or our financing, but the opportunity to work with us within an ecosystem
As Ngmoco will be a publisher more than a developer, it allows them to spot interesting games that might want to move to other mobile platforms as they become available – migrating the software to Android or the new ‘open’ Symbian operating system when it appears. It’s all about spotting the intellectual property and getting it licensed and published in order to maximise return and providing their previous expertise in order to make the most of it. Potentially very profitable if iPhone sales estimates are to be believed (6 million iPhone 1.0 sold already, 14 million iPhone 3G predicted in latter half of 2008 and 24 million iPhone 3G predicted for 2009)
From what I can see, Ngmoco’s job will be mostly to introduce new developers to the cut-throat gaming market.