April 23rd, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | 2 Comments »
TelcoGames, the worlds best known aggregator of mobile games, seems to be as good as out of business as various sources reported to us today.
Several developers have tipped us about letters they received in which TelcoGames’ status is set as ‘in administration’. This means as much as that administrators are trying to get the company in a good enough state to sell it, or wind it up if no one is interested.
For the many developers that still need to get money from TelcoGames, this news doesn’t come at a surprise, though it does mean that they will probably not see any money any more.
On January 28th, TelcoGames hired Juan Montes in order to restore faith in the company that closed their Fathammer and Magic Studios on November 5th. Last December, Falcon Mobile already announced to sue TelcoGames over outstanding invoices. On July 6th of last year, Mark Ollila, founder of TelcoGames, switched from his position as CEO to a position at Nokia. Another big switch last year came from Darren Newnham. The former SEGA Mobile chief joined TelcoGames, but even though he had a big name, he never got mentioned again.
TelcoGames doesn’t only have a history of failure. Their SIL game got huge recognition and even got ported to PC platforms. Also, TelcoGames managed to get huge numbers of operator contracts and let’s not forget that for some time they got sole distribution on many Hands-On channels.
So will this be the end of the aggregator, or the beginning of a new one…
hopefully the end! Several operators pushed the developers to telcogames – at the end they had what they want the content on the portal. The only looser is again the small developer! Who paid indirectly the salaries of TG
Indeed, cowboys does not even begin to describe Telcogames. Darren Newnham left them in October by the way to pursue other interests. I think the writing was on the wall there for a long time.