When people think of episodic games, they might think of Telltale Games and their Sam & Max series. Others might think of Valve and the Half-Life 2 episodes. However, when it comes down to sheer volume of content, nothing compares with Kuma Reality games.

Over the past few years, Kuma has put out dozens of episodes of their various ad-supported episodic games. This so called "television model" has proved successful, and now the company is looking to expand. A partnership with IBM and Akamai provides the hardware and software necessary to meet this expansion, as well as improve the experience for Kuma's current customers.

We chatted with Keith Halper, CEO of Kuma Games, Dave Laux, IBM's Global Executive for Games & Interactive Entertainment and Brian Harvey, Industry Marketing Manager for Gaming for Akamai Technologies, and discussed Kuma's future with its new technological partners.

The Kuma\War has escalated
Kuma is probably best known for their sometimes controversial Kuma\War series, which has recreated notable battles from recent history. The company has branched out from this, however, with games based upon the Shootout! and Dogfights series from the History Channel and The Kill Point from Spike TV. Now, with this new agreement in place with IBM, Kuma is looking to expand worldwide.

"We're a five-year-old company now, and there are about six million copes of the Kuma client out there," explained Halper. "As we've built up, one of the things that we noticed is that most of our customers are outside of the U.S. Instead of looking at this phenomenon as a cost burden, we decided to embrace it and tried to monetize it. One of the challenges for doing that is running a global database. Downloads were slow and our customers often couldn't read the pages because they weren't in the right language."

"Now we're looking to take our games to a global level and IBM is instrumental in the doing that," Halper continued. "They understood our business and our audience and they proposed a variety of solutions to all of these problems. They've been a great partner, providing some very interesting solutions for trying to scale overseas. First, we picked up the Akamai technology, a solution used by global organizations. Second, we placed multiplayer servers around the world to service our global audience, because speed and confidence is critical for the consumer. If someone downloads a client and they can't find someone online to play with or can't connect to our servers, we fail. The nice bonus from all this is that we've seen an increase in our U.S. business as well, an over 40% conversion rate from people who try us out."

"Traditionally, clients look for us to deliver on a worldwide basis," chimed in Laux. "This particular solution did not require deploying data centers worldwide and [Kuma Games] still got to take advantage of reduced cost and increased speed both nationally and internationally."

"[Everything IBM provides is] critical for us," added Halper. "Since were an episodic game company, this allows us to focus on great games. We believe that if we can get them through this first experience, we can keep them coming back."

Of course, there's a third partner in this whole deal: Akamai. Their Electronic Software Delivery solution coupled with IBM's blade centers is truly what has made this global move for Kuma a reality.

"We have an extremely close relationship with IBM, so they brought us into the distribution agreement to get Kuma's content out to users," explained Harvey. "We had a couple meetings with Kuma, and after that, they jumped on board."

"They're using our electronic distribution platform," continued Harvey. "We have 34,000 servers in 71 different countries. With Kuma on our network, we reroute a client's request to make sure the Kuma game that they're getting is coming from the fastest server possible. We have a tremendous amount of tools to help reroute in real-time. No matter which client we're dealing with, we will reroute and our customers will experience no downtime."

Making sure 'Sex in the City' doesn't end up in Saudi Arabia
Of course, delivering on a global basis doesn't work unless you serve your clients correctly. Ads for American baseball don't mean much to a teenager in the Czech Republic. However, Kuma and Akamai are making sure that the appropriate ads get served in the right parts of the world.

"As an example of global serving, we have these severs in Egypt, and all of my ads there are in Arabic, which is more or less automatic thanks to the software," detailed Halper. "So with very little effort on our part, the ads are regional, and as time goes on, you'll start to see things that go beyond that with our network. For instance ad companies can also send videos, and we ran a recent promotion that allowed people to run around the plane in Lost. We think we'll be doing more of that, but for now, the regional networks are filtering out relevant ads."

"The market for advertising in-game is growing," he continued. "Many [advertisers] are looking to get into games because people are drawn [into the medium] and away from things like TV. [These advertisers] are trying to reach certain demographics, so this interest in games has expanded of late. Another benefit for us is that we're also able to get to regional advertisers in English speaking parts of the world.

"Ultimately, the goal for us is to get all the way around the world. We believe that advertisers will become more aware that games are a great place to reach people. We also think that people in the U.S. want to play others on a global basis; we're not only selling these episodic games, but also opportunities to play with others around the world."

Not bearish on Kuma's future
While the primary focus of this deal between IBM, Akamai and Kuma is international expansion -- and it opens up the possibility for more original content on an international basis -- ultimately all aspects of Kuma's business will benefit. The speed and convenience of downloads is a boon to customers in the U.S. as well, and it's also important for online play.

"I am interested in anything and everything that will improve a customer's experience, whether they are in New York, London or Istanbul," said Halper. "The client we use to launch games is important, as well as having the media files specific to the right language. Delivering as quickly as possible, with content proper to the specific region, is really important. The primary benefit is speed; when somebody clicks to get the client, they get it from the fastest place, so they're just getting the data that much more quickly."

"A lot of times, people don't know how successful their game will be. They can look at their pre-orders to gauge it roughly but they often don't know until it's in the channel," explained Harvey. "By contrast, let's say Kuma puts out the game that almost immediately gets 400,000 downloads. If you have tens of thousands of users pulling it down and you don't have the infrastructure, you'll be hurt. Gamers can be finicky, and if you're not reliable, you can lose them forever. Ultimately, it's making sure that the demand from end users is met; we scale to the success of the game and our infrastructure can support it. We've proven with the PSN and the Wii's Wi-Fi Network that we scale properly to large groups. If there's a game out there that can knock out our network, I'd be impressed! We've been proven through natural disasters in the Mediterranean and in Taiwan and we make sure to give end users their money's worth."

"The Kuma model is not the same as most companies who talk about constant new content and they mean every 90 days," commented Faux. "It's about delivering clients on a daily basis, allowing them to engage their clients in a whole different way than most companies."

"We're working on having things refreshed on a daily basis, based around daily events," confirmed Halper. "The other primary thing from this agreement deals with multiplayer services. The new services that are being provided are very powerful, and it's very different from the way we've done multiplayer servers in the past. We can do more games on a simple box, and we're not reliant on [users] using their own boxes, and we can also make sure that it's properly configured. It all allows us to reach more people with our games."

"People are hearing more about the other things we're doing. Also, we've improved the product line and we're rolling out improvements to the old episodes for the new client. We've been doing episodic content for longer than anyone, and we know they need fresh content on a weekly basis. People are going to see more of what they want for free and a better game on a weekly basis. So our customers should expect things that are completely new from Kuma in the coming years," concluded Halper.

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/ad-watch-ibmakamai-helping-kuma-win-the-fight-for-episodic-games/?biz=1&page=2