Magmic Games is a developer and publisher of mobile games and through its Bplay portal develops and distributes the majority of titles available for BlackBerry handsets. Games On Deck talks to Magmic CEO John Criswick and Bplay Vice President Nicholas Reichenbach about the company and the BlackBerry market.
Games On Deck: Tell us about Magmic Games.
John Criswick: It started in 2002, focusing on mobile games development. We started to grow a presence in Canada and in the BlackBerry space, and that was initially our forte, but really now we're developing and publishing for North America and mobile as a whole.
GOD: Is BlackBerry still the core of your business?
JC: I'd say our core business is mobile game development.
GOD: But how big is the Blackberry market?
Nicholas Reichenbach: It's tiny. It wouldn't even be one percent of the mobile game business. But the good thing for Magmic is that we enjoy 70-80% of that.
We initially signed a deal with RIM [Research In Motion, the Canadian-based developer BlackBerry] that isn't an exclusive deal, but it's close as no one else has an agreement with them like that, and since then we've been the first company to publish games on the BlackBerry. We sell our games to RIM and they give them to their customers. Our active audience is about 760,000 to 800,000 users world wide via the RIM platform.
When a BlackBerry user thinks of games they think of Magmic. We're in the millions of downloads on BlackBerry. We really went strategically into that market as a young company when RIM was young too and pitched it to them and now we're the premium entertainment publisher for BlackBerry.
That's one market segment, our other market segments are J2ME, Brew, Windows Mobile, all of which we've got a strong presence in. J2ME in Canada and now in the United States too, and globally with Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. Many of the top publishers deal with us to put their games on Windows Mobile and BlackBerry.
GOD: How does development differ on a BlackBerry?
NR: Different language. It uses components of Java and J2ME, but it's a different language that is proprietary to RIM. Because of our relationship with RIM we've become experts in developing and porting to it.
JC: BlackBerrys have a different user interface, too. You've got a trackball.
GOD: What titles have been particularly big hits on BlackBerry?
NR: There's a couple. Like Ka-Glom, which launched aggressively and picked up really quickly in the BlackBerry market. I thought it was a great game but I didn't realize it was going to be such a hit. So we really expanded on it and got proper J2ME distribution in Canada on all the carriers, and it really took off as a brand.
Ka-Glom
Ka-Glom is a really fast paced, addictive puzzle game that's also network enabled and we deliver new puzzles each day. It's kind of a "Tetris" kind of game, but it's different and really addictive.
I'm sure that we're going to extend that brand in future.
