Coming to a screen near you(3)

Inside story

　　The small fry

Ling Yun, part-time independent app developer.

We offer services to solve technical problems that others find difficult to deal with, often concerning Flash Player and similar programs. Usually, PC programming projects are easier to handle, and app development can be undertaken using the same principles.

Four core team members deal with apps problems on a part-time basis. They all work for IT companies as their day jobs. Some of them work for companies such as Baidu and Wanmei, one of China's biggest online game websites that started trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market in 2009.

In our spare time, we work together to develop apps. We helped to develop the official website for Singapore travel, which was a relatively easy task. We could easily produce a game app such as Angry Birds within a month.

However, we don't receive as many orders as we would like and so we can't quit our day jobs and become really independent.

The big fish

Jim Lee is general manager and publisher at EA Mobile China.

Because mobile gaming is a mainstream entertainment, many of the characteristics of mainstream entertainment apply.

First, brands matter. Thousands of movies are made each year in Hollywood, but only a handful of blockbusters take the lion's share of the box office.

Second, quality matters: No matter what platform you are looking at, once the novelty wears off, the high-quality games stand out. Naturally, Games is a different media (to movies) and has its own idiosyncrasies. One of them is being interactive. So the business model really matters.

Making a game is difficult, but making a brand is truly difficult. Many Chinese gamers grow up with brands such as The Sims and Need for Speed. They love those brands. Many Chinese developers are at the cutting edge of business model innovation and we respect them for that. But by marrying brand, quality and learning from Chinese developers on business model innovation, I believe EA is in a unique position to be successful in this market. We value our customers' loyalty greatly. Our next game will be free-to-play and customers will find many Chinese elements there that will delight them.