April 8, 2007
Fresh Starts
Finding Their Niche in Cellphone Games
By BARBARA WHITAKER
KARINA SIMONS became a cellphone game designer almost by default.
With just a few years of experience in game development, she was working at Fountainhead Entertainment when the company shifted its focus from making films using video game technology to creating games for cellphones.
As a result, the company’s only game designer left.
“A lot of people who come out of game schools want to make more elaborate PC games; he wasn’t too happy about making cellphone games,” she said.
Ms. Simons, a programmer at the time, was more than happy to do it. “I definitely see a career here,” she said.
After a slow start, cellphone games are getting a fresh look from companies that want to capitalize on the abundance of cellphones, now estimated at more than two billion worldwide.
Snake, the first cellphone game, hit the market in 1997 in a Nokia phone. But only recently has cellphone gaming caught on as a business, opening the door to new job opportunities.
“The industry is still small and there is competition to find good employees,” said Anders Evju, general manager covering the Americas and Asia Pacific for I-Play, a mobile game publisher based in London. “Lots of people are coming from wireless, but not too many have experience in mobile and wireless gaming.”
Mr. Evju said that schools known for turning out game developers for consoles and PCs have not yet developed programs for cellphone game designers. At this point, many of those entering the industry are drawing on their existing skills and learning new ones in the workplace as they go.
“I joke to a lot of people that rather than pay us for an education, we’re paying them,” said Katherine Anna Kang, founder and president of Fountainhead Entertainment, based in the Dallas area. “We actually trained an intern here that had never worked with a computer before, but she was a great traditional artist. With a little training, she translated really well into a computer artist.”
Ms. Kang said one challenge was that many people in the computer game industry had been trained to work on high-end games with complicated graphics requiring lots of memory. In a way, working with cellphones is like turning back time.
“We have to be very conscious of memory, and you can’t throw in a lot of art and codes,” she said. “It’s a different skill set having people who work in an environment where size is an issue.”
The company has worked with Ms. Kang’s husband, John Carmack, a computer game creator well known for games like Quake and Doom, to bring new games to the market.
A few years ago, Mr. Carmack’s disappointment in the games loaded on his new cellphone led him to begin creating his own games — Doom RPG and Orcs and Elves — that are being developed by his wife’s company.
Despite some limitations, cellphone games present new opportunities. They offer a chance for real-time interactive play, and they can be used while waiting in line or killing a few minutes before appointments. They are also attracting more women.
“It’s a completely different environment,” Mr. Evju said. “The console game industry is dominated by young males. In mobile gaming, about 48 percent of the users are female in an age group between 20 and 45.”
The games, which are sometimes already loaded in the phone by the carrier, can also be bought and downloaded through wireless Internet connections. They are typically played by using the numbered keys and the phone’s circular control pad.
Among the game developers in greatest demand are those with a broad understanding of wireless networks and those who can oversee a project end to end, said Roxane Lukas, senior manager of human resources North America at Electronic Arts, one of the largest cellphone game companies.
Salaries for programmers start at about $35,000 and go up to about $50,000, said Nathan Eddy, associate editor of FierceGameBiz, which covers the video game industry. Skilled artists typically make about $50,000 to $60,000, with salaries for producers ranging from $50,000 to $75,000.
For technical jobs, Ms. Lukas said, the company tends to look to software developers, particularly those who have worked on cellphone billing software. She and others noted that cellphone games need to be tailored to work on a wide variety of handsets made by many different companies.
“If you’re going to develop a game for a personal computer, you only have to develop for one platform,” said Mike Breslin, vice president for marketing at I-Play. “In our industry, we make a game and have to redesign it 600 times because there are all kinds of phones.”
Unlike games for personal computers, which can be found on store shelves, cellphone games are typically sold through the carrier. And in cellphone user menus, phone games are often placed among offerings like ring tones and can easily go unnoticed.
To counter that, Mr. Breslin said, companies are looking for ways to team with retailers to drive consumers to Internet sites where games can be bought.
Most cellphone game makers say that helping a game reach its market is one of the biggest challenges.
“I would predict it’s going to be a much more important piece of the gaming industry,” Ms. Kang said. “Right now, it’s in its fetal stage, and unfortunately, you have a situation where the cellphone providers don’t understand what they have in their hands, and the public wants to play cellphone games that they can’t get their hands on.”
Fresh Starts is a monthly column about emerging jobs and job trends.
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