Glu Mobile have recently opened a studio in Beijing, China, and have just launched a mobile game based one of the summer's most anticipated (and debated) films, Transformers. Games On Deck talks to Glu Mobile CEO Greg Ballard about these events and the company in general.
Games On Deck: Can you give us a little background on Glu Mobile?
Greg Ballard: Glu was actually started in 2001 by a group of people who came from Electronic Arts. They were looking for the next big thing, they talked to a venture capitalist and used the money to enter the mobile games business. In those early years there wasn't a lot to say about the business, but they released some titles, got some traction in the marketplace and then in late 2003 I joined the company.
The company had been focused mostly in the United States and mostly on sports when I joined, and we made the decision fairly early on to broaden our portfolio beyond that, and that we were going to become an international company. So we embarked upon an effort to find companies that would allow us to do that, especially in Europe. In late 2004 we acquired a studio in London, which not only gave us access to development but also distribution in Europe.
In 2006 last year we acquired a company in the UK called iFone, which gave us access to a lot of very high quality brands that had been perhaps underexploited by iFone, as they were not an international company, and so we were able to take those brands and leverage them on a worldwide scale.
We've gone from been not even in the top 50 of companies in an industry that had barely 200, 300 companies to a company that ranks at number 2 or number 3 in the rankings on a worldwide basis in a massive industry in a really rather short period of time.
GOD: Can you describe your studios?
GB: We have three studios today, and a fourth just beginning. We've got our original studio in San Mateo, we've got a studio in London, a new studio which we just announced in Beijing, and we've got a studio in São Paulo, Brazil. It mostly does porting for the local market currently but there are the beginnings of some original development there too.
Each of those studios has their own expertise, but they're all pretty versatile. We have in each of the studios multiple teams and each team is likely to work on multiple projects across each year.
GOD: Why open a studio in China?
GB: In some respects you could change that question to "Why did it take you so long to open a studio in China?" As several of our competitors have done similar things, not just in China but in India and in Eastern Europe.
Much of what we do has been semi-automated over the years. We've got lots of tools and development expertise in a platform sense that allows us to rapidly port to up to a thousand handsets. The ability to do that in a routine, systematic way is something that we wanted to make sure that we could make portable, so we could export that to another studio if we needed to. So we've made sure that London and San Mateo used the same tools and same platforms. So while other companies have gone to China and India to try and reduce their costs, they haven't been using the same sort of development environment were, and they've been looking to just sort of get cheap labour.
Well, we already have some of the least expensive ports in the world, so we haven't been forced by competitive pressures to move into China before we were ready to. Now we've got this system and platform ready to go where we can take it to a studio in China and train Chinese employees to use it and be reasonably comfortable that the ports that will result will be the highest quality possible and also very low cost, because they're using our system.
What this allows us to do potentially with our ports is turn them into the lowest cost possible. So if we spend $200, $250 dollars per port today, with the Chinese studio we could be spending as little as $50.
GOD: Do you have interest in trying to break into the Chinese market?
GB: We do have some interest in that. We're actually in the Chinese market today, but it's not a particularly large market currently when you compare it to the US, Europe, or even Australia and New Zealand. We have faith that it will grow and it's certainly part of the reason we wanted to start a studio in China, so we could develop Asian product lines which are obviously quite different from the western styles of games. I think this could help us be more accepted in Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and Malaysia.
So the Chinese studio is primarily to develop globally-minded titles but is also to have a subset of its employees working on Asian titles.
