New Platforms Eyed By Frima, Making Fun, Telltale Games

SAN FRANCISCO -- Several developers and publishers at last week’s Game Developers Conference told us they were looking to expand their support to new platforms. But Android seemed to be the platform that most of them wanted to start developing for the most.

Telltale Games in San Rafael, Calif., now makes its episodic titles for PC and Macintosh computers, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and Apple’s portable devices, CEO Dan Connors said. It has launched 32 titles across those platforms to date, he said. The company is also “interested in” making games for Android, he said, but didn’t provide any specific plans. Telltale would also like its content to be made available for the coming 3DS and NGP handheld game systems, he said, saying his goal was to be “on as many platforms as possible."

Telltale sees social networks including Facebook as “a way to reach consumers” with its episodic content, Connors said. But he said his company’s goal is “to sell a high-quality entertainment experience,” so it isn’t focusing its efforts on the social platforms. It launched a free Back to the Future: Blitz Through Time game on Facebook in October that “was a very effective marketing tool for us” to help promote its episodic Back to the Future game for other platforms, and got “a lot of impressions,” he said. He called it “a good first play into the space.” It plans more initiatives along those lines, but would like its next social network offerings to be “a little more integrated into the game experience” of its core episodic game content, he said.

Social game publisher Making Fun now makes titles for Facebook and Apple’s portable devices, but it will support Android “very soon” also, said John Welch, its vice president and general manager. There are no plans to supply games for the handheld and home videogame consoles “in the short term,” he said. The consoles tend to “stifle innovation,” he said. The News Corp. division will also “not immediately” support BlackBerry or Windows Mobile 7, he said. That’s “purely an installed base issue,” he said, pointing to the much larger base of mobile game customers on the Apple devices and even Android devices. While iOS had a huge head start over Android, he said the latter platform’s installed base was “growing rapidly."

"There’s no platform that we don’t touch,” said Steve Couture, CEO of Canadian developer Frima Studio. The company has developed games that it and other companies, including Ubisoft, have published for platforms including the three home consoles, the PSP, Apple devices, Facebook and even the Kindle e-reader, he said. Frima’s main focus is on casual and kids’ massively multiplayer online games, as well as social games. About 90 percent of its business is now “work for hire,” he said. The company is now making its first PS3 game that uses the PlayStation Move motion-sensing controllers. That title will be released later this year, he said. It hasn’t made a game yet that uses Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, but Frima’s R&D department is “looking at the technology” and “we're ready to work on that,” Couture said. The company also hasn’t started developing a game for the 3DS, but is developing for the NGP already, he told us, saying Frima already received the software development kit for Sony’s coming handheld system. He didn’t provide the names of the coming Move and NGP games.