Primedia has entered into the mobile gaming world through the acquisition of 50% of Airgames Entertainment, a mobile gaming products and services provider.
The value of the deal has not been disclosed, but the move makes Primedia a player in a market forecast by research house Informa Telecoms & Media to grow from $2.6 billion worldwide this year to $11.2 billion by 2010.
BMI-TechKnowledge analyst Richard Hurst says mobile gaming is a good fit for Primedia. "It has made several forays into the electronic media world and it has possibly learned a lot of lessons from that," he says.
Primedia Content CEO Ferdi Gazendam says this is Primedia`s first step into the industry, which he adds is one of the fastest-growing segments of the mobile data market.
Primedia is already a console and PC gaming distributor through Ster-Kinekor Games and Gazendam says expanding into mobile games provides the opportunity for the group to draw on its existing licensing expertise and relationships with international studios.
Airgames, founded in 2002, offers a range of mobile gaming applications and is the exclusive licence holder and distributor of MMS product suite IAMEMO and the Spinfone connected mobile gaming platform.
It also provides its own mobile content provisioning platform, Midlet Earth, which delivers mobile content across multiple channels.
Hurst says the mobile gaming market is still in its infancy in SA. "The handsets need to be out there, as well as bandwidth in terms of 3G."
He says there are still questions around the profile of users, who are not in the high net-worth sector of the population. "At this stage the market is restricted to gambling and the youth market."
The scenario is different in Europe, where users have the technology and bandwidth, and are also more tech-savvy, he adds.
But even at this early stage there are revenue benefits and the market is growing. "As a portion of mobile revenues, it won`t be as big as voice. It will be a subset of data, so it will push data revenues up."
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