TechPulse 360

Zeebo's $200 console brings mobile phone technology into the video game industry

Going after Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft’s Xbox is a challenge most companies – even very large ones – wouldn’t even think of doing.

Why bother indeed creating yet another video game console when the market is pretty clearly defined among the 3 leading brands and that the world is experiencing its worse economic downturn in almost a century!

But despite common sense, San Diego, Calif.-startup Zeebo did the unthinkable and launched its video console at the Game Developers Conference, here in San Francisco.

I’ve met with Zeebo CEO, John Rizzo, at GDC and here an excerpts of our conversation.

What is Zeebo?
It’s a new game console for the emerging first world. The 800 million individuals in the emerging middle class in Mexico, Latin America, Russia, China, India.

Do you stand any chance against rivals like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft?
There’s no established console market of any scale in these markets because:

1. consumers can’t buy local contents, because piracy is rampant and no developers – locally or in the U.S. – would want to develop content for these markets;
2. consoles are expensive. In brazil the Wii is a $1000! The Zeebo will sell for less than $200, 5 times less expensive. In the markets that we try to serve, we benchmarked the console price at a discount to the consoles in that particular country. In Brazil, $200 is lower than a PS2 by a substantial amount. We expect that outside Brazil the console will be less than $179 this year. Well below $149 next year.

How can you be sure the games will not be pirated?
Because for the first time, we’re using 3G delivery networks as a content delivery mechanism, pirate proof, very secure. So what we did with Zeebo, is a low cost console hardware built on cellphone technology optmized for the local requirement of the culture.

What games will be available for the Zeebo?
We’ve been able to sign 15 of the top video game makers, EA, Activision… In these markets, they don’t generate any money or income, and it’s all upside to them. So they see us as a direct marketing channel of their old content in these existing and new markets.

Creating a game for a new console is expensive. How did you convince video game publishers to do it?
Porting a game is actually a small amount of work and money relative to the cost o developing a new game, which can cost tens of billons of dollars. It takes about 2 to 6 months and between $50,000 to $100,000 to do a port. It’s a very very small expense.