Interview: AT&T Investing Millions in Gaming

During E3 IndustryGamers sat down with Glenn Broderick, AT&T's Executive Director of Gaming, to find out more about the company's initiatives in the games space. Although AT&T's presence in gaming is more behind-the-scenes, the company's network is a force to be reckoned with, especially with the massive adoption of Apple's iPhone (for which AT&T is the exclusive carrier). 

“My gaming team was formed in 2007 to figure out what to do with these tens of millions of customer connections with respect to gaming. Gaming was placed in the converged group with the underlying belief that there was value to be had in tethering experiences between your mobile phone, your TV, and your broadband connected PC. ... A good example of that would be Wheel of Fortune where you interacted with your cell phone in real-time with the TV show,” Broderick said.

Broderick said his group has been outlining a strategy over the last year and the plans were finally approved. AT&T is relaunching the games section of AT&T.net – Broderick said it's going to be rebuilt from the ground up “to serve everyone from the casual gamer to the core gamer.” He added that AT&T is doing lots of strategic partnerships with major game companies to “make the site come alive.”  Furthermore, Broderick informed us that AT&T is going to be really pushing AT&T.net to be the online home for its customers, which will automatically drive 10+ million people towards AT&T's new gaming focus. 

Beyond relaunching its games website, AT&T is also preparing an IPTV gaming service. The company is still at the RFI (request for information) stage, but Broderick claims “it's going to blow the socks off what's on any other cable provider.”  We asked him if this would be tied to Microsoft's still unannounced IPTV service for Xbox 360, but he couldn't confirm anything on that front other than to say that the network is certainly flexible enough to support anything from a set-top box to a home games console. 

On the mobile side, AT&T is taking its .net website to phones for a “more consistent experience” between PC and mobile. Essentially, AT&T has a “three-screen focus,” Broderick said. “We're looking at the TV, broadband connected PC and mobile almost as a unified platform,” he stressed. “What we're doing is trying to incentivize [gaming companies] to take some risks by tethering mobile games to console or PC experiences. It's not an easy sell – it's a risk in an already risky business, but we have programs in place to help them offset that risk. ... As you know, marketing budgets on games can sometimes exceed development costs, and the type of advertising support we can bring to partners who are willing to try and help us realize this three-screen vision, we can help them offset their risk by augmenting their marketing.”

Similar to other game website portals, Broderick said that AT&T will also likely resell publishers' games in digital format. “The way we look at it is we have between everything almost 100 million customers, and we are evenly distributed demographically, so there will be lots of people who just want to play Bejeweled but there will be others who want to download Call of Duty. We need to accommodate them all,” he said. 

It's certainly not an easy task and other sites have tried and failed at the all-inclusive approach, but Broderick is confident. “The customization work we're doing combined with our customer relationships will enable us to put together a service that is relevant to the customer, so that if I'm a mom of two who plays Bejeweled, when I go to the [portal] I'm not going to see an ad for the next Call of Duty or something.”

He continued, “We're putting a ton of money into back-end systems for both mobile and the broadband site... We're making serious investments in the games space because it's now seen as a huge strategic initiative for AT&T. And before it just wasn't; it wasn't on the executive agenda.”

Broderick also is optimistic that cloud-based gaming services like OnLive that provide games on demand will take off in the next 5-10 years, and he sees AT&T and its network as a big player in that. “When we're looking at a cloud-based future where things are being streamed back and forth rather than being downloaded once, that has obvious network issues that we need to be proactively dealing with. It's an opportunity for us to really highlight the value of the three screens we have. We have the expertise to deal with enormous networks that are handling enormous tasks. ... We're in a position where we're prepared to be the leaders in the cloud-based space.”

He added, “World of Warcraft hosts with us and Xbox Live hosts with us. I think the fact that those huge brands with huge loyal fans trust us with the serving of their customers speaks volumes about our potential in the gaming space.”

Broderick wouldn't give us an exact estimate of the substantial investment AT&T is making in games, but he joked, “It's more than a million and less than a billion.”