Publié le 1 février 2008, modifié le 18 octobre 2014.
Par La Rédaction

Here are 4 questions to Kristof Van den Branden CEO La Mosca

Publié le 1 février 2008, modifié le 18 octobre 2014.
Par La Rédaction


Can you tell us more about your service ?

La mosca is a publisher of city games. These games are “location-based games”, city games where your position is a determining factor. La mosca is unique in the world with this concept. You will not find any other publishers who only focus on this type of new game genre. Our game The taget is targeted at individuals. They can go to 4 game centers in Belgium and 5 in the Netherlands (and soon also in France) and rent the devices, Nokia 6110 Navigator GPS phones. These game centers are shops were players can game online or buy games. They have excellent opening hours: from about 11 AM till 4 AM and this 7/7!

Our 4 other games are all teambuilding games, offered by event companies in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. We develop our own games (like The target) and develop tailor-made games for event companies and tourist organisations.

What is your business model ?

La mosca earns money with every game that is played. Individuals rent the devices at the game centers and pay a group price of 90€. Usually, these are groups of about 10 to 12 players who can play 2 hours in the city center. The game center keeps a distribution cost and forwards the rest of the money to us. Event companies also pay per game that is played. We can monitor where all games are played by whom on our server, so we invoice them every month for all games they have played with their customers.
We try to cut our costs by outsourcing all the development, we only develop concepts and commercialise our games. We also have a sponsorship by Nokia. They give us the newest GPS phones, so that we can rent them in the gamecenters. And we will close a deal with a major map manufacturer, so that we can offer our games in cities all over Europe.


What are the projects, additional features you’re preparing ?

There are plenty of projects. First of all we will expand to France, Germany, Spain and Lithuania. This means we will start offering our games through event companies and game centers in the major cities. Secondly, we are opening the first citygames shop in the world, in the Belgian University city Leuven. This shop will only offer our games, nothing else. If this is succesful, we will try to export this concept to other cities and countries. And we are producing our sixth game at the moment. New features aren’t coming up, as we first need to learn the world what citygames are and how much fun they are!

What are the current users’ feedback, your learnings on the service’s usage ?
On the business side: we noticed there is a big interest in our games: people are really looking for exciting outdoor group games, so our guess was right! On the games: keep it very simple, also make the use of the devices very simple. We have put a lot of effort in the usability of our games and we continue to invest in the user-friendliness of everything we develop. On the technology: we were lucky Nokia introduced their GPS phones this Summer, their A-GPS feature works really well and we don’t need to work anymore with Bluetooth GPS receivers, which was really a hassle!

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