MMO house Perfect World heads into mobile space

Perfect World Entertainment, the Redwood City, CA studio best known for publishing titles such as Star Trek Online, Battle of the Immortals and Neverwinter, has made its first stride into the mobile game space. Although the studio, a subsidiary of its Chinese parent Perfect World, has thoroughly explored MMOs and the free-to-play space on PC, this will be the company's first foray into mobile games -- and Perfect World has four mobile games lined up and ready to go soon. The publisher's first lineup of mobile titles includes trading card game Elemental Kingdoms (pictured above) from Chinese dev iFree Studio, The Null Society RPG from Agent Disco, Arena of Heroes from Austin's Sneaky Games, and BombBuds from the Fugazo studio. But why now? Fabien Pierre Nicolas, general manager of mobile at Perfect World Entertainment, tells me that the company now has the right people for the right jobs. "Our internal studios and business teams now includes veterans from mobile companies such as Gameloft and DeNA," he noted. "We have worked hard to recruit the right people with mobile expertise." It was waiting for the right developers -- and the right technology -- to mature that led Perfect World to wait it out until the time was right. "Our internal checklist included having great high tech devices that could support the high end games we make," Nicolas tells me. "We also wanted to make sure that there were enough external studios out there making great core games and studios switching over to developing for the mobile platform that were interested in growing their F2P expertise with Perfect World Entertainment." Now that massive companies like GungHo, King, Supercell and Kabam have proven that the mobile space can accommodate larger entities, Nicolas says that, "we think the next year has the potential to be a very good one for Perfect World mobile." "The market is tough," he admits, but adds that if the company can create high quality titles for mobile, "we will be able to break through the clutter."