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Tips for Negotiating Mobile-Game Development Agreements

By Steven Masur

The mobile-game industry can be lucrative. Mobile games ' which can be downloaded to cell phones and other mobile devices ' can be cheaper and easier to develop than games created for platforms like PCs or game consoles, where users expect higher production values. What also makes mobile games attractive to developers and entrepreneurs is the potential market of consumers who already carry and use cell phones ' estimated at 207.9 million nationwide and 2 billion worldwide. Mobile games present huge brand opportunities as well: Celebrities such as hotel heiress Paris Hilton, rapper 50 Cent, skateboarder Tony Hawk and poker champion Phil Hellmuth have each licensed their names and images to mobile games. Tom Cruise, notoriously shy of associating his name with videogames, lent his name exclusively to a Mission Impossible III mobile-phone game.

But to access these potentially large returns, developers must deal with complexities ranging from the need to redevelop or 'port' the same game to various platforms ' such as Brew, Java and J2ME ' and tweak it for display on a wide variety of handsets, to navigating the nettle of contracts and legal issues in a long and complicated value chain from developer to end user.

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