Daycare Nightmare for Retail!

Any moment now I'm expecting the UPS guy to walk in our office with a big box full of Daycare Nightmare games in boxes! We partnered with the good people at eGames, who brought Cake Mania among many other casual PC games to retail stores all over the world. They saw Daycare Nightmare on one of the portals and got in touch about a retail version of the game, with which we were happy to supply them.

Daycare Nightmare launched on Yahoo Games exclusively in July. Then we rolled it out to the other major portals this fall. For our first casual PC effort, it's done extremely well. The game's basic play pattern is familiar to those millions of you who have played Diner Dash, Carrie the Caregiver... all the way back to the ur time management games like Root Beer Tapper.

But for our game, we wanted to have more of a sense of humor, and more character interaction. So our little baby mobs all have special freakouts when they aren't getting the love and attention babies need. And when they are happy, they play together sweetly on the carpet.

I'm putting together a talk for GDC this year that compares and contrasts (mostly contrasts) the difference between bringing a new-IP game to mobile and casual. I'll compare Mo-Pets and Daycare Nightmare with the aim of making recommendations for improving the overall way that content is handled in the mobile games industry. After our experience with Daycare Nightmare, it's clear that the mobile industry has a lot to learn from the way the casual PC people do their thing. More on that talk as it develops.

So when you are doing last minute shopping, or spending all your Best Buy gift cards, please look out for the retail version of Daycare Nightmare and give Molly a hand with those baby monsters!

Panel at CES Game Power

Every year since at least 2001, Victor Harwood has hosted the Game Power event the day before CES. The Consumer Electronics Show hasn't focused much on games since E3 started, but Game Power keeps me coming back to Vegas in January. My panel this year is gonna be a good one... It's called:

Mobile Gaming Experience - the Next Generation in Games, Devices and the Coming High Speed Delivery of Content

Featuring smarties like Leo Jun, Senior Manager of Games, HELIO, Travis Boatman, Vice President Worldwide Studios, Mobile, Electronic Arts, Mike Yuen, Senior Director of Gaming Group, Qualcomm Internet Services , Stephen McDonnell, Market Development Manager, Games, Ecosystems and Market Development, Mobile Devices business unit, Motorola, Inc. and Key Sar, Vice President of Business Development and Strategy, SkyZone, and moderated by Michael Cai, Director, Broadband & Gaming, Parks Associates, plus me, it should be a rousing discussion.

I've worked with or done panels with all these guys over the yeahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifrs... Leo has been at Helio since the beginning, and has been instrumental in building that carrier into the most forward thinking content-MVNO in the US. Their purchase experience and community features are second to none - at least on this continent. Travis was one of the very first employees at JAMDAT, and was a major reason for that company's success. Now he leads the mobile studio efforts at EA, which, among other things, has published Floodgate games like NASCAR and Madden. Last time we were in Vegas we played roulette and had an absolutely crazy string of thirteens come up. Stephen I don't know as well, but we've hung out a couple of times together and it will be interesting to hear Moto's point of view on mobile games, especially with regards to their Wi-Max initiatives. Key Sar is an ex-Verizon content guy who moved over to the content publisher side in July. We haven't talked lately, but it's always fun to hear old carrier hands complain about the way carriers run their businesses.

Aside: yesterday I was talking with Jason Ford (ex-Sprint, now Namco) about gathering a group of ex-carrier content guys who now work at publishers together. Besides Jason and Key, the folks we know in this category would include Scott Edison (ex-ATT, now at Oberon), Andrew Stein (ex-Cingular, now Popcap), Tim Harrison (ex-Vodafone, now EA) and Lou Fasulo (ex-Cingular, now Vivendi). We could probably squeeze Paul Palmieri (ex-Verizon, now Millennial Media) up there as well, although his company isn't a game company. Hit me back if I'm forgetting anyone you know. The rub of the conversation with Jason was all about the cloaking devices we'd need to employ to hear the unvarnished truth from those guys. I was suggesting a combination backlit grey screen and voice-disguising machines. Jason went further and suggested we hire b-list actors with ear buds to mouth the words the panelists were feeding them. No one would know for sure which celeb was which guy.

Anyway, if you are going to CES, please stop by the session. It's in the Las Vegas Convention Center, North Hall, 2nd Fl. on Sunday, January 6th at 2:30. Here's a link.

First!

Ah... the first post in Floodgate Entertainment's new blog. Like opening a window in a stuffy office, or the initial blast of heat after weeks of a non-functional furnace, I've got a feeling of ventilation and comfort. Good to be getting back out there in the world.