@ GDC: How Mobile Game Developers Avoid The Carrier's Deck In Japan

David Collier, who runs a mobile content provider in Tokyo called Pikkle, told developers today at GDC Mobile how Japanese game developers are avoiding two of the industry's biggest headaches—sharing revenue with carriers and porting the same game to hundreds of handsets.

"There is a new type of application category that will bring us out of the claws of the carrier and bring us to the promised land of mobile entertainment," he said. In Japan, Collier said the trend is to create short, simple games based on Adobe's (NSDQ: ADBE) Flash Lite that create games in a browser. In one game Collier demonstrated, a waiter grabbed the food as a buffet passed by. In another, the player creates an avatar and a room, where friends could visit and leave a message.

He said by using Flash, the developers won't have to tweak an application for every phone because it runs in the browser which are fairly standard. And because it's not an application, it also means that developers can avoid the carrier's deck as being the main point of distribution. "With Java or Brew, you don't spend that much on the initial game, but then you do when porting it. Even with Flash if you spend a lot on the initial game, the porting cost is next to minimal," he said. For one Japanese site, he tested the game on 20 phones, but it ended up supporting about 200. "Flash does solve a lot of the porting problems, when you are turning around a lot of games every week," he added.

He said the games have been phenomenally successful. The most popular is Mobile Game Town, which for context, said has three times as much traffic as Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO) Mobile, and gets about 15 billion page views a month. The company has 7 million registered users, and nearly 1 million Flash games are played daily. He said the business model is still evolving, but many of them rely on Flash ads inside the games. In some cases, people also pay monthly subscription fees.