Interview with Fishlabs' Michael Schade

For years now, Fishlabs has made some of the most impressive games seen on mobiles. In the year since the App Store opened its doors, it has also proved itself as a major player in the flourishing iPhone games market.

Of course, the iPhone gaming scene is in some ways a tougher nut to crack. With thousands of games released, many of which sink without trace, you need a strategy in order to make a mark. Fishlabs' strategy is in making quality full 3D games - a pretty bold strategy too.

We talked to Fishlabs CEO Michael Schade about whether the company is going to return to mobile, where it thinks the App Store is headed and whether it's going off course.

To find out more about Rally Master Pro, Fishlabs' plans for the future and what they think about 3GS-specific gaming, read on.

It seems like the Fishlabs' focus has very much been on the iPhone rather than java gaming of late. Are you planning on returning to the java platform?
Over the past five years, we have been investing a lot into our Java programming skills and have been rewarded with lots of great reviews for our titles. Unfortunately, selling cutting edge mobile games through carriers (dealing with fragmentation, brand focused deck management, poor marketing possibilities and a poor business case and to a large extent software piracy) has never been a profitable business for us.

So, we had to change our focus to iPhone or the lights would have gone out at Fishlabs forever. Hence, unless the ecosystem for mobile java games changes fundamentally, we won’t turn back.
 
The transition from java to iPhone seems like a natural one for Fishlabs games thanks to their high-end visuals, but have you experienced many issues in bringing over games to the device?
We have to admit that the transition from high-end Java to iPhone provided more challenges than we expected. First of all it takes quite a while to port the code from Java to C for iPhone. However, with our first four titles this wasn’t an issue as we already had BREW ports, which are also written in C, in place.

With Rally Master Pro we will launch our first title taken straight from Java to iPhone and we have been working on this now since January, just to give you an idea of the workload behind this. The real challenge is to get the controls right and give the game the right iPhone appeal.

Basically, you need to redesign the whole user interface as a brutal port of keypad interaction, which is kind of lame for a sophisticated platform like iPhone. Last but not least on iPhone we spend five to ten times more budget on sound design. While Java can hardly playback several sounds simultaneously and because of memory limitations, the quality is fairly low in any case, on iPhone we can have CD quality sound and implement even sound effects using OpenAL.
 
There’s been a lot of talk about whether the 3GS’s graphical capabilities with split the market. Do you have any plans to implement 3GS-specific features, or even develop 3GS-specific games?
From the demographics we pulled from Waterslide Extreme we know that iPhone 3GS has a market share of 13 percent, maybe around 15 percent in the meantime. In any case it is way too early to come up with a 3GS-specific game now. We reckon early next year it will make sense to have a game that supports 3GS-specific features but will still run on any other device. We won’t look into 3GS only games before the end of 2010.
 
Several of the most high profile adver-games on the iPhone have come from the Fishlabs studios. Are these becoming a main source of income or is Fishlabs still mainly about its own games?

We are aware that some of our fans are somewhat disappointed that we are launching so many ad games instead of releasing another original Fishlabs title. The reason is simple: The ad games business has become a healthy revenue stream with fairly low risk for us that helps us funding our costly development of our own games which is very risky, considering the race to the bottom price tag that is still going on.
 
It seems like the pool of Fishlabs mobile games that haven’t yet made the transition to iPhone is getting near to running dry. Do you have any brand new iPhone games in development?
We have still some gems in the shelf like Snowboard Hero, Blades & Magic, Gladiator and Galaxy on Fire 2 that haven’t been brought to iPhone yet, but we are also considering to come up with something fresh for the iPhone in the second half of 2010. It might be based on an existing Fishlabs brand though.
 
Rally Master Pro is on its way to the iPhone. Are you worried about how the game will compare to Real Racing, generally considered to be the best fairly realistic racer on the platform?

Real Racing is the de-facto standard in racing games on the iPhone, no doubt. We are aware that Rally Master Pro is going to be measured by this benchmark. However, since the gameplay of a pure rally racing game is fairly different from a racing game on round asphalt tracks with laps we hope Rally Master Pro will become the de-facto standard in rally racing on iPhone. We think the great number of tracks and the level of detail we provide in these, the more simulation-style 3D physics, the car damage model and the weather simulation are good assets to let the gamers decide.
 
Fishlabs was one of the main companies to embrace the Zeemote. Do you think that controller peripherals are going to be a big part of iPhone gaming’s future?
The Zeemote is a great peripheral for any mobile device that has only keypad input but for the iPhone with great analog touch/tilt controls we don’t see any great benefit here.
 
If there was a feature you could add to the iPhone to make it a better gaming device, what would that be?
The iPhone is already a stunning gaming device. Anything that is added will only drive fragmentation and weaken one of the platforms’ advantages: 50 million potential devices (including iPod touch) sold that can run one single SKU of a game. Let’s hope Apple will keep it that way as long as possible.
 
It seems that in the past few months, even the largest games companies have started using extreme price drops as a sales/marketing strategy. Do you think this will prove harmful to the market in the long run?
We are very concerned about this. It simply is the wrong message to consumers that if they wait just a little they get high production games for $0.99. User expectations are constantly rising but with the quality of games improving the production costs go up. If chances get lower to make a reasonable return on invest the potential of the platform won’t be taken to its limits. Gamers won’t like that, devs won’t and, for sure, Apple neither as the iPod is now officialy competing against DSi and PSP. The race to the bottom is a dilemma.
 
Do you like the idea of the long-touted ‘premium games’ section of the App Store? What do you think the price ceiling should be for games, if not £5.99?
A price tag is not only about a certain amount of money you are paying for something. It is also about user perception. If priced correctly, consumers can expect a certain level of quality and look for the best games in a certain price category. Devs can build their business case on that and decide which price segment they are targeting. Hence, we say rather than having just one premium category, users should be able to search for the best games at a given price tag.
 
To the end-user the App Store seems like a very centralised thing, but of course it’s actually made up of a host of App Stores setup in different territories. Have you noticed differences between what gamers from different countries like in your sales numbers?
It is not easy to market your games for every single territory and of course there are great differences what kind of games are popular in a certain country. However, since about 50 percent revenue comes from the US plus round about 13 percent from the UK followed closely by Germany with 12 percent, we at Fishlabs focus on these markets.
 
What are your favourite iPhone games? (Not including Fishlabs ones!)
We have great respect for console-style games like Firemint’s Real Racing, Gameloft’s “Modern Combat” and “NOVA” or EA’s “NFL Madden” and “Need for Speed Shift” look very promising. However, my personal favourites are “geoDefense” by Critical Thought Games for its spectacular neon graphics, spot-on cyber audio and addictive gameplay same as “I Dig it” by InMotion, a very polished and fun game. Both games are absolute must haves.