Kabam expands to mobile with new Kingdoms of Camelot title

Social gaming developer Kabam has released its first mobile game, and has begun a new initiative to expand beyond social and web-based platforms. The game, Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North is an iOS release based on one of Kabam's existing web IPs, and is but the first in a series of mobile titles for the core-focused developer. "At a high level, we want to go where our players are, and we think there are going to be a lot more core gamers on mobile in the coming months, so our business is going to be a lot more mobile-focused going forward," said Kabam's VP of mobile, Matt Ricchetti, in an interview with Gamasutra. Ricchetti explained that since mobile devices have evolved to support in-app payments and persistent online features, they are a good match for Kabam's social strategy titles. As such, Kingdoms of Camelot on mobile uses the same basic design as its Facebook counterpart, but uses an interface more suited to smaller, touch-based screens. Despite sharing a number of similar design elements, however, the mobile version of Kingdoms of Camelot will not offer any connectivity with the existing Facebook game. According to Kabam, this segmented approach made the most logistical sense, as the audiences on each platform are quite different. "We decided to do a standalone game for a couple reasons. One, it allowed us to expand the game's story a little easier… But in terms of the more structural stuff, we did a consumer insight gamer study last year that showed that there isn't a lot of overlap between web and mobile for us in terms of our users right now. "It was a bit surprising, but we wanted to make sure we were addressing mobile players as mobile players. We wanted them to feel like this game was built for them," Ricchetti explained. Currently, Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North is only available for iOS devices, though the company says that it eventually wants to develop content for a range of mobile platforms. Outside of this new title, Kabam confirmed that it has at least one other mobile strategy game in development.