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As CEO of Soshi Games, when I walk into Universal’s headquarters in London to speak with representatives of the largest music company on the planet, I need to be 100 per cent sure that the games we have developed will work.
We make games like Music Festivals on Facebook, a social gaming experience that allows users to build their own music festival, book acts, and share new music with friends. These games create new revenue streams for the music industry and discovery opportunities for new artists. Labels spend millions of pounds on marketing their artists, so ensuring every channel looks slick and functions perfectly is a key consideration.
Soshi’s games all rely on a fast, always-on internet connection. Making our software dependent on this level of connectivity enables real-time updates to content, even to mobile, and streaming rich media, such as music and video, straight into the games. This comes with a downside of course – a fast, reliable internet connection is required to make this work in the consistent, high-quality manner that gamers are used to.
In 2013 Soshi was able to address this by joining EE’s Future Creators programme. Designed to bring superfast connectivity to some of Britain’s most exciting entrepreneurial organisations, the programme equipped participants with the 4G kit and data plans needed to boost business growth and unlock opportunities that were simply not an option on 3G.
Since joining Future Creators, 4G has been a real help to both our sales and development teams. When you build mobile apps that rely on the cloud for their content, being able to reliably demo, develop and ultimately sell them is paramount. I used to walk into meetings with record labels and managers of bands, wondering whether I’d be able to access their internet connection – frequently I couldn’t, usually due to some security, firewall or other technology issue. With 4G, I don’t have this issue. I can set up the apps exactly how I want them while travelling to meetings, which saves a lot of time in preparation. And 4G’s speed also means I can show bands their games, knowing the quality will be consistent.
Soshi has big plans for 4G use within the business, creating gaming apps that rely on high speed connections. We are looking to start streaming live performances through our games, delivering exclusive multimedia content to mobile, desktop and home-based devices.
4G has also helped us streamline our development processes and improve flexible working for our staff. Our developers and creatives are a pretty mobile bunch and 4G allows them to work from a multitude of locations, as well as on the move. While we’re all used to this, the speed of 4G really helps when you’re experimenting with higher bandwidth content such as music and video. It’s also a useful alternative to shared fixed-line WLAN services if they become over-loaded or fail, keeping the company moving when others might be unable to work.
One of the services Soshi has created is a robust, global trivia delivery engine, which enables us to stream rich content and associated trivia to devices globally. We recently developed the only official mobile game for up and coming band Lawson, which is a great example of this. Our 4G-powered, always-on, real-time gaming service means we can make changes to trivia as they happen and push new content packs straight to fans any time we want.
Soshi has big plans for 4G use within the business, creating gaming apps that rely on high speed connections. We are looking to start streaming live performances through our games, delivering exclusive multimedia content to mobile, desktop and home-based devices. Development pipelines include real-time, ‘second screen’ trivia games (working with some of the world’s largest media production companies), user-created festivals and other innovative gaming apps using rich content in new exciting game designs – all of which will be powered by next generation 4G wireless connectivity from EE.
In our experience the faster and more reliable the internet connection, the more our designers can let their imaginations loose, to innovate and create new market-leading gaming apps.
