JAMDAT Mobile

» see jamdat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

JAMDAT was american at the carrier layer, which is the layer that decided everything about mobile games before 2008. Its business was getting a game onto the menu inside Verizon or Sprint's deck, where an american teenager browsing their phone bill would find it and pay three dollars. That menu did not exist in turkey in the same shape. The games on my phones in those years came preinstalled by Nokia or off the operator's own portal, and the publisher's name was not something you ever saw.

It started in march 2000 in Los Angeles, founded by Scott Lahman and Zack Norman with Austin Murray, all of them out of Activision. Mitch Lasky, also from Activision, took over as chief executive in november of the same year. The bet was straightforward and early: phones were about to get color screens and java, and somebody was going to be the publisher when they did.

The bet paid. JAMDAT spent 2003 and 2004 buying up smaller studios, went public in late 2004 and by the end of 2005 was the largest mobile games publisher in the world, worth about 565 million dollars on the market. It held the phone rights to Tetris and Bejeweled. Its own biggest hit was JAMDAT Bowling, a game whose entire premise was that you could bowl on a phone with a nine-key keypad, and which sold millions of copies at three dollars each because in 2004 that was genuinely something.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The economics were unlike anything in games before or since. There was no retail and no storefront in the modern sense. There was a carrier, and the carrier billed the customer directly and took roughly half of everything. Getting a game listed high on Verizon's Get It Now menu was worth more than any amount of marketing, which meant the real product JAMDAT sold was a relationship with a phone company.

That is also why the catalog looks so odd from here. Bowling and a licensed Tetris were not chosen because anyone thought they were the future of the medium. They were chosen because they fit in under a megabyte and could be understood by a person killing four minutes in a queue, on any of a hundred incompatible handsets. The constraint made the whole category, and the whole category evaporated when the constraint lifted.

~ what really happened ~

Electronic Arts announced the purchase on 9 december 2005 at 27 dollars a share in cash, valuing JAMDAT at 680 million dollars. The deal completed on 14 february 2006 and the name was retired the same day. What had been JAMDAT became EA Mobile, and the catalog was refilled with the parent company's brands, so the phone version of Need for Speed and the phone version of FIFA arrived on the same menus JAMDAT had spent five years fighting to get onto.

It was a good price for a business with eighteen months left in its original form. The iPhone shipped in june 2007 and the App Store opened in july 2008, and the carrier deck went from being the only door to being irrelevant almost immediately. Games stopped costing three dollars, then stopped costing anything, and the company that had been the biggest publisher in mobile was by then a division of a company that had bigger problems.

~ what replaced it ~

Almost every habit the modern mobile games business runs on was rehearsed here, badly and on hardware that could not support it. Small payments billed by a third party who owns the customer, and a store ranking that decides who lives. The App Store did not invent that model, it inherited it and removed the phone company from the middle.

Mitch Lasky left EA, went to Benchmark as an investor and backed a small company doing voice chat for gamers called Discord. Which is a longer way of saying the JAMDAT people were right about where the players were going twice, and only got paid properly for the second one.

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