Arthur Goikhman is CEO of New York-based mobile games company Cellufun.
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The last several years have seen little in the way of innovative multiplayer gaming for mobile phones. Sure, some downloadable game publishers have made some attempts in this arena. Digital Chocolate’s Café series was a commendable stab at it. But for a variety of reasons, including both behavioral and technical roadblocks, the perception has been that multiplayer games are to mobile what cordiality is to Presidential politics: nice to talk about, but a near impossibility in practice.

Of course, it’s possible that the reason no one has developed compelling multiplayer mobile games is that there’s just not a market for them. Does a consumer really want to lose a team deathmatch because his buddy’s squirrely EDGE connection caused him to lag and get shot in the head? Of course not, and this is a problem that’s not going away any time soon.

However, most mobile phone users couldn’t care less about fragging aliens on their RAZR’s. They simply want some fun games to play with friends without hassle, and they want them to be cheap, or better yet, free. U.S. mobile operators are starting to do their part in balancing one side of the equation by making all-you-can-eat data plans available for reasonable monthly flat rates. On the other side of the equation are companies like Cellufun - our mobile gaming portal offers free (ad supported) multiplayer games that consumers play directly in their phone browsers. 

The games, which Cellufun develops in-house, require no downloads and work across all handsets and carriers in the same way that a PC gamer can log on from any PC and play Bejeweled over an internet browser. And guess what? People are playing. And playing a lot. Cellufun now sees 150 million pageviews every month from 5 million unique users, well over a million of which have registered accounts. This shows real demand for multiplayer gaming and is especially impressive considering that the vast majority of these players are coming from “off deck.” In other words, they are going on the mobile web and actively looking for games to play rather than clicking on a link provided in their carrier’s own walled garden of entertainment choices.

Our games are generally very easy to play (there are some exceptions, like the more hard core “Space Wars” galactic domination game). Second—and perhaps more important—the games are all very social in nature. They are all part of Cellufun’s larger social community, which features user home pages with avatars, a virtual economy funded through Cellupoints, and a virtual mall where users can buy and sale wares. 

Cellufun’s most popular games are ones that require people to play cooperatively with one another in order to gain more standing in the community or simply to gain a sense of personal accomplishment. Take our hit game Call of the Pharaoh, which took the top prize for best mobile game at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona. This is a game in which players have one goal: build the biggest pyramid. To do this, they must recruit other players to help them lay bricks and complete levels. Of course, players who help others are much more likely to receive help when they ask for it, so the game becomes a literal pyramid scheme. What makes this all work is that users don’t have to be online at exactly the same time. If one U.S. user posts a request for help at 8:00 pm in Chicago, a friend living in Budapest can respond when she wakes up in the morning and then make a request of her own.

Or take Cellufun’s popular virtual Farming game. The goal here is to raise increasingly complex crops, which you can then sell in the Cellumall for virtual currency or use in other games. (Need corn to make corn bread stuffing in the Thanksgiving game? Just grow it!) But to get started as a farmer, you must first recruit players for an old-fashioned barn raising event. Once you’ve recruited enough players, you’re off and running, but each time you plant or harvest new crops you’ll still need to ask people to help you plow the field or bring in the crop.


Or consider Cellufun’s mobile pet games. These are not unlike other downloadable mobile pet games you can get from a carrier’s game deck in that you must feed, play with, and generally pay attention to your pet. The difference here is that a mistreated pet will run away to another member of Cellufun’s community, and that you can board your pet with friends when you’re going to be unavailable to take care of the little critter for a while. You can also send your pet to play on your friend’s phone with his own pet. This is the new face of mobile multiplayer games.
What also sets Cellufun apart is that it also allows players to play the same game on multiple platforms. PC users can play with the mobile friends via Cellufun’s Facebook application, and soon via Cellufun’s own web site. The games are exactly the same, and because the multiplayer aspects don’t require players to be online at the same time the games lose none of their functionality or fun factor. A gamer can literally play a game on her phone as she commutes into work and then pick up where she left off on her PC. No other mobile gaming company offers this level of continuous connectivity.

Much like the Wii has forced us to redefine the modern gaming console and the modern console gamer, Cellufun’s approach to multiplayer mobile games has redefined multiplayer gaming on the go. No longer a pipe dream restricted by technical and behavioral hurdles, multiplayer mobile gaming is alive and well—perhaps just not where you expected to find it.