Metaflow 2010 - Mobile Games Blog

2009 was a changing year for Metaflow with many of our clients freezing technology expenditure, implementing job cuts as well as off shoring roles wherever possible. Publishers continued to find trading conditions harsh with further cross publisher deals occurring (Namco’s J2ME business through EA for example), some liquidations (PlayerOne, In-Fusio) and growing Smartphone excitement and support, indicating that J2ME had most likely peaked.

There are also still too many parties in the value chain between the developer/publisher and sales channels. This is eating into margins where the business model continues to be submitting content to put live on deck. There continues to be few unifying standards and low visibility on real time sales /downloads across multiple channels which publishers must have to effectively run their businesses. Increasingly direct sales channels which do not provide a clear ROI are being dropped and pushed to willing aggregators who benefit from many to one deliveries.

In the final quarter of the year, Metaflow won the ‘Best Games Service Provider’ category at the Mobile Entertainment Annual awards in London. We were delighted to win this award as it reflects four years of working hand in hand with the majority of publishers in the industry to increase revenues and reduce time and resources used to earn them.

The Market in 2010

We expect Android to make a big splash after the first quarter with more of the scheduled devices hitting the streets and more sales channels asking for smartphone content. Java will continue to be the most popular downloadable content type, although only the ultra proficient parties in development and deployment will chose to continue to service this area and then probably not with the volume of titles seen in the previous years. More application stores and more parties/platforms supporting all downloadable content types will appear and these all need feeding with content, currently via a legacy push model. Cross carrier /portal visibility of download numbers for forecasting will still remain an issue, especially in EMEA, D2C will grow as CPs pull consumers with more advanced devices into their eco systems through direct marketing and search based discovery.

Metaflow in 2010

We will begin to commercially roll out multi content type support (Android, Blackberry native, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Flash etc) in our industry leading content submissions client and provide the submissions capability to push these content types to their major revenue generating channels here in Europe and in the USA.

The full commercial launch of Metaflow’s B2B Marketplace in Q1 will forge a new way of interacting with sales channels B2B, including relevant application search and discovery of what is available both now and in the future in terms of device coverage, platforms, languages, videos, demos and so on.

Later in the year we will release the capability to stock marketplaces and channels using our ingestion standard via a more automated technical delivery (as opposed to the classic package, submit and stocking process used today). Our ingestion standard will also enable an industry standard communications API allowing a content provider to see a single dashboard picture of submissions /download states for titles across multiple sales channels that have integrated using Metaflow’s standards. There are around 30 so far including several major Operators and D2C providers and these numbers will grow during a focused campaign in Q1 2010.

You can read the full news release under:
http://blog.mobilegamesblog.com/2010/01/io10-charles-mcleod-metaflow.html