Monopoly fuels EA's march

[W1nTry]

Monopoly fuels EA's big push into mobile

Go directly to jail

By Tony Dennis: Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 11:13 AM

HOOKING UP with games producer, Hasbro, is fuelling a new big push into mobile gaming by industry leader, EA. The first fruit of this alliance is Monopoly Here and Now.

The move is motivated more by brand protection than technological advances, Tim Harrison, EA Mobile's marketing director, revealed. With the likes of Apple and Google moving heavily into the mobile internet arena, EA is ensuring its brand is protected, too.

That said, Harrison did concede that other factors make mobile more attractive to EA, too. For example, with HSDPA enabled handsets entering the market [Nokia launched the 5320 only yesterday] – downloading games is becoming much faster.

Plus all-you-can-eat data tariffs are making consumers more willing to download games whereas on previous tariffs they had little idea how much each download would cost.

Interestingly, the mobile version of Monopoly isn't enabled for online gaming. The reason for this, Harrison said, is that the European market is too fragmented to make this feasible.

He pointed out that in other markets online mobile gaming was feasible because of a dominant standard – In the USA it is Qualcomm's Brew and in Japan it is NTT Docomo's i-mode. There's no direct equivalent in Europe yet, he says.

Consequently, Monopoly is merely pass and play for up to four players in the mobile version.

EA Mobile's trumph card, however, with be the mobile version of the next Harry Potter movie – the Half-blood Prince. This should be released around November either simultaneous with the film itself or a possibly a few days before.

The INQ saw a demo of Harry Potter and it is as good as any console game. The difference is that the mobile game will be designed to last for a shorter period – around 30 minutes, which research has shown is about as long as people normally play on their mobiles.

EA's Harrison believes that the games producers will continue to enjoy strong support from the operators – such as Vodafone, because mobile gaming is established and "provides a robust revenue model."

Wondering why Monopoly is sub-titled 'Here and Now'? Purists will be horrified to learn that it has been modernised. The INQ landed on Brixton Hill, for example. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go.

Monopoly is available for immediate download from EA's WAP site http://wap.eamobile.co.uk.