I had no idea what I was getting into when I moved from Philadelphia to San Diego for a job as a QA Engineer at THQ Wireless. I chalk it up to the “Force Luck”, but I fell into the lap of some of the most talented individuals in the industry. The one thing I learned during my time there that stands out above all the rest is that it’s really damn hard to survive as a publisher of mobile content for a multitude of reasons. I’d like to point out a few of my observations for anyone interested.

1. Required Handset Support Lists- Some of the major North American phone carriers provide a list of handsets which are required to support all incoming applications. It’s likely that decent percentage of these devices will surely produce a low, or even negative, ROI. The time spent developing these watered down ports of blotchy graphics with a beeps and boops soundtrack clutters up the development pipelines beyond belief and submission fees make it hurt even more. This gap between profitable and nonprofitable handsets has increased significantly with the increase of smart phones in the market and the carriers reluctance to pull older handsets from their support list.

2. NSTL- Verizon is the most profitable US carrier to work with but all supported devices must be certified by NSTL, and it is expensive. VERY EXPENSIVE! Grandfathered handsets aren’t required to pay entrance fees, but the grandfather chart hasn’t been updated by NSTL in many months. The FAQ section from NSTL’s website can’t be trusted. The submission process takes a long time, especially if you’ve been bestowed upon with the almighty Self Test Status. For all these reasons the costs just go up and up, not to mention the advancements to the actual devices that your porting and QA teams must adapt to.

You should have a top notch QA department if you plan on submitting to NSTL, and they better be testing with a TBT. Certification failures happen from time to time but if you are submitting to NSTL you need to be ready to wake up at 2AM (yes, NSTL QA has a night shift) and investigate if you get that email sent to your Blackberry saying you have a cancellation or even the dreaded failure. NSTL testers are quite good at what they do, making money for NSTL by failing or canceling builds. Fortunately there is some flexibility and their support, from my experience, is quite easy to work with. “Failures” can be contested but on some occasions NSTL will just not budge and leave you scratching your head and submitting to their mercy.

During my term as a Submissions Coordinator a strategy which I used a few times was to submit a build to NSTL about 2 weeks before the release to operator date. In the event of a failure this would minimize costs and also give QA and Post Production an opportunity to straighten out any issues before submitting the full batch of builds. This is highly recommended if time is on your side.

3. Carrier Decks- Most mobile gamers browse the current catalog for their device on the phone and the default homepage will most certainly be set to the carrier’s deck. For this reason good relations with the carrier and the Game Manager will be paramount to the success of your game. Your pipeline may at times be unexpectedly upset and cause delays for reasons out of your control. If the cost of your loss will be a reasonable % of your expected profit, I recommend you to work through it, stay focused, remain calm, and most importantly begin thinking about other projects in development before it is too late. Never take your aggression out at the carrier. This will only threaten the relationship your company has built and jeopardize your game’s status on their deck.

The lifespan for a mobile game is short and these decks are preplanned. Big names, big games and big publishers take the top spots and even on launch day your game will appear after them in the New Releases categories. Without a deal worked out you can kiss your chances of making it into the Featured games goodbye. The Most Popular section will always be dominated by Tetris, Bejeweled, a Bejeweled clone, some incarnation of Pacman and Guitar Hero.

Screenshots should be carefully chosen to entice consumers. Animated gameplay footage is recommended. Researching each deck’s search engine and using search keywords correctly would also be beneficial.