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Gone are the days when video game junkies were forced
to find the nearest arcade to get their fix. Video games
are all over the Internet, on portable devices and on a
multitude of in game consoles, and two Marin entrepreneurs
want to take advantage of one of the fastest-growing venues
of the bunch: cell phones. "Wireless gaming has taken off even faster than the traditional gaming business did," said Mike Yuen, the director of the gaming group at San Diego-based wireless technology giant Qualcomm. At their small office in Bel Marin Keys, Nelson and Holland said that they are aware of that accelerated pace. "The past 20 years of (computer) gaming is happening in about 3 years on the cell phone," Nelson said. "The evolution of the technology is happening very quickly." But while the pace is fast, the wireless gaming market has one thing going for it that its predecessors on the Internet didn't. Unlike the early days of the internet when companies of all stripes were creating content for it without any way to make money, the cell phone market already has a built-in billing infrastructure. Cell phone users have contracts with their cell phone carriers and receive monthly bills, and those users have had to pay for almost all wireless content since the beginning, from ring tones to games. "It allows us to know going into this that we have a way to make money," Holland said. Timelapse is by no means alone. In fact, one cellular gaming company, Los Angeles-based JAMDAT Mobile has already gone public, debuting on the Nasdaq at $16 per share in late September. The company has a market cap of $475 million. JAMDAT had made it name as a licensee of well-known game brands like Tetris. "We're placing our bets a little more on original content," Holland said. Timelapse hopes to create original games that target a more casual gamer than most of its competitors. To do that, the duo will focus on accessible games like
trivia and puzzles on subjects like pop culture and specific
decades. The pair convened a group of San Rafael High School
students as a focus group earlier this year. The pair are keeping the specifics about their games close to the vest but said they've developed some games that are designed to test the hipness of the game players."compared to them, we definitely seemed like a pair of old fogies, but we're not," Nelson said. Qualcomm's Yuen likes that approach. "They're not coming into the space and saying, "We're going to become
JAMDAT and try to take these other companies head on," Yuen said. "I
think
they have a pretty good shot at it." The pair said they've met with all three major cell phone carriers. But they also have tapped into a system that Quallcomm has designed to facilitate the game development process for cell phones. The initiative is called BREW which stands for Binary Runtime Environmnet for Wireless. It is a standard business and development framework for wireless software development. As Yuen explains, if a game maker taps into the BREW system, it will meet the standards of the cell phone carriers and also have certification of the system behind it. "we're trying to make it easier for folks to take their applications to market," he said. Timelapse is now an official BREW developer. But Yuen said Timelapse must convince investors to put up some funding this year in order to keep pace, particulary because it is so much cheaper and easier to develop a cellular game than it is to make a video game. "Like any good idea, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody else comes along and copies it," he said. "So it's all about execution and bootstrapping is not the way to go. If they really want to go for it, they're going to have to get funding." Nelson and Holland said they know they'll need to raise between $4 million and $5 million to be able to work on multiple products at once. "You want to build a series of games," Holland said noting that approimately $400 million in venture capital funding has been invested in cellular gaming in the past two years. The two have the experience in the industry to get investors'
attention. # # #
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Wireless
Gaming is Just a Phone Call Away