MOBILE PUBLISHER ACQUIRES EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT STUDIO
London, Paris, November 23rd Mobile games publisher and distributor Telcogames Limited has announced the acquisition of game developer and publisher Magic Productions Limited, one of the world's leading creators of games for Symbian & Microsoft Windows powered mobile “Smartphones”.
The purchase of Magic Productions is part of Telcogames strategy to build an extensive catalogue of first class content for the rapidly growing Smartphone market. It provides the company with a best of breed development studio as an internal resource.
Jamie Conyngham, the CEO of Telcogames, said, “The Magic Productions acquisition is an extremely good fit for Telcogames. We think the studio is making some of the best mobile games in the world at the moment. We want to supplement our world leading J2ME & Brew portfolio from over 100 publishers with our own high-end games aimed at the serious and experienced mobile gamer who demands an extremely high quality product”
Founded in January 2003 with Headquarters in Paris, Magic Productions develops high end, console-like games for the latest Symbian and Windows mobile phones. Magic Productions owns a number of videogame and console licenses and has developed near perfect versions of a number of classic games including QWAK and the masterpiece that is Another World, which has already earned critical acclaim from the media. “A real game... Finally mobile gaming is moving in the right direction...93%”, said MobileGameFAQs and awarded Another World their highest 'Ice Cold' Award.
Telcogames has also commissioned Magic Productions to re-create the hugely popular Cannon Fodder and more recently Nebulus both of which are released in November 2005 and are already being extremely well received by gamers and review sites.
Under the terms of the agreement Telcogames will continue to build the Magic Productions brand and Nicolas Hamel will become Head of Development for Telcogames. The integration of the companies and hence completion of the agreement will occur in early 2006.
Nicolas Hamel, the CEO of Magic Productions said, "we are very excited about the deal with Telcogames. Together we are forging the path to a true gaming experience on a mobile phone. As the phones get more and more powerful so will the games that Telcogames publishes. We are following the technology curve."
Symbian is the most widely used Smartphone operating system in the world with Q1-Q3 handset shipments at over 23,000,000 devices.* Total worldwide installed base of Symbian devices is currently 48 million and by 2008 the number of Symbian devices on the market is forecast to be 200 million. 3G carriers are looking to increase ARPU and are adopting Symbian devices at a faster rate because of their ability to support rich media applications such as high-end games, video and music downloads. In October 2005, IDC said “Nokia's Series 60 (Symbian) multimedia-oriented devices such as the 6630 and 6680 continued to enjoy solid demand, the 6680 becoming the world's best-selling WCDMA device”.
“Magic Productions have developed a highly portable Application Programming Interface (API) which speeds up the development process and allows Telcogames to release games more quickly for every high end platform. The acquisition ensures Telcogames will remain a leading publisher in the Smartphone games market and allows us to publish the most compelling and sophisticated titles to consumers worldwide. Already our launch titles have created a new benchmark for quality and gameplay in the mobile games market “ says Conyngham.