Glu Mobile Plans a Turnaround With Social Games for Smartphones

Glu Mobile has had a tough time of its past few business quarters. The mobile phone game maker ended up its most recent quarter by reporting a $3.2 million loss this Tuesday, following a year of similar losses. There's a plan to turn the 450 employee company back to profits, though. That plan is social games for mobile devices, according to CEO Niccolo de Masi, who joined Glu in January. The company also just raised $13.5 million in new funding to support its new focus. By social games, de Masi means titles like those seen on Facebook, featuring mostly asynchronous play against friends. There have been few true social games on mobile devices to date, mainly because the major smartphone platforms -- right now, just the iPhone and Android -- don't have the necessary scale to support massive virality and virtual goods-based games. "Glu has unique advantages to succeed here, namely in being able to address all smartphone users," says de Masi. Since Glu has traditionally developed its single-player games for multiple platforms at once, de Masi sees it doing the same thing with persistent social worlds, thus reaching the needed scale to support a freemium game. Right now, of course, even the iPhone and Android combined might not provide enough potential players. But de Masi sees that changing quickly. "Starting this Christmas and on, the playing field for so-called super phones will be set -- iPhone, Android, Windows and Palm [HP] will be the big four, with maybe [Intel's] MeeGo becoming important after that. There's already almost nothing for sale in some markets except smartphones," he says. Like other companies that have talked about crossing the major mobile platforms, de Masi is optimistic about the potential. "There are very few mobile games that generate more than $10 million a year," he says. "The reason that's not $100 million as it is online is because of fragmentation and homogenization. We think we're the first company that can start breaking through that glass ceiling." While the market will have to live up to de Masi's expectations, part of the plan depends on how well the games Glu actually produces turn out. games themselves. Glu plans to release five mobile social games this year; we'll be reporting back on those first efforts when they're ready.

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Glu Mobile Plans a Turnaround With Social Games for Smartphones

Chris Morrison

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Chris Morrison