Chillingo closed a huge deal with EA yesterday (becoming the second big iPhone publisher in as many weeks to be picked up), but the company’s work with its biggest title apparently left a bad taste in the mouth of the developers, Rovio Mobile. That company tells TechCrunch that they’ll never work with Chillingo, or any publisher, again. That’s not so much a reflection on Chillingo, though, as it is on Rovio’s success — Peter Vesterbacka says that with the way the App Store is set up, you just “don’t need publishers” any more.
For a lot of iPhone developers, I would disagree — Chillingo has put together a nice set of iPhone titles over the past few years, and seeing their name on an iPhone game can give a nice boost in profile to a developer just starting out. Obviously EA agrees — while this doesn’t mean we’ll see EA start taking advantage of the Angry Birds license (necessarily — I’m sure Rovio is poking around in as many places as possible to recreate the Angry Birds game on other platforms), it does mean that EA is getting access to a significant amount of experience in creating, publishing, and marketing iPhone games. Chillingo seems to have a talent for finding titles of solid quality that are willing to experiment a little bit, so this should bring us some more EA games that are outside of the standard Madden/Need for Speed/Tiger Woods ilk.
As an iPhone user, I’m excited about both the Chillingo and the Ngmoco deals recently — both will create more options for two iPhone publishers who have made a solid name for themselves, as well as bring a little more standing to the platform at large as a great place to publish and release great games. Rovio’s done with iPhone publishers, but the rest of us are just getting started.
Rovio Mobile passing on Chillingo in the future originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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