Playing by instinct
Within a year, Instinct Entertainment wants a million Japanese mobile phone users to be designing games for their own cellphones. Ambitious? You bet.
Wednesday, July 29 2009 || Features || BY Jehan Casinader
“Dan is one or two years ahead of his competitors. Instinct will attract financial interest in Asia, faster than any other Kiwi company I know of.”
It’s all very well to give the tools to ordinary folk to play with, but Milward and Lloyd want to woo corporate giants like Disney too. They want big brands to pay for the use of Game Creator as a marketing tool to enhance corporate branding. Coca-Cola, for example, may invite its customers to log on to the Coke website, design a game using Coke graphics, and download it to their mobiles. Milward believes he is a “gaming purist”, but he knows his software is a perfect vehicle for viral marketing.
“The big brands enable the little gaming guys like us to make cool software that we think will appeal to a wide market,” he says. “They have their motives, but so do we. They want to do some branding; we want to allow people to have fun. It’s possible to make that relationship work. But you can’t fool young consumers. They’re so savvy. Even so, a Coke game doesn’t need to be riddled with Coke branding. It could be subtle, and just as fun.”
Japan is one of the world’s most sophisticated technology markets, and it’s inevitable that Instinct will have to keep innovating to stay ahead. So far, the firm hasn’t encountered problems in securing IP rights for Game Creator. Milward says Japan lacks user-generated cellphone content, except for a few “really bad puzzle games”. He wants to offer something new, fun and fresh to Japan’s 30 million mobile customers, many of whom pay around NZ$5 each month for access to mobile content.
Once the firm has gained a foothold in Japan, Milward wants to tackle North America, but the plan of attack seems hazy. Instinct had planned to sell a ‘lite’ version of Game Creator to consumers, and an ‘advanced’ version to corporates. It is unclear whether this model will be retained. It has also not decided whether the revenue from Game Creator will be generated through subscriptions, advertising, licence fees or royalties. The revenue collection and distribution processes are yet to be devised.
These key strategic decisions will only be made once Lloyd has won over the Japanese content providers, and these discussions are now underway. But, even in the current economic climate, Game Creator will be cheap to manage, cheap to subscribe to, and easy to use. Despite this, there is an obvious risk: Game Creator’s success relies on gamers themselves, who will build, test and refine the games for free. But Lloyd, who has sold 15 firms over 25 years, is convinced that Instinct is a safe bet.
“Instinct’s technology is good, but you bet on the jockey, not the horse. Dan is very good at anticipating what people will think, feel and do, as a mass audience. That’s a unique talent, and it’s the strongest selling point of the company.
