ROK Expands Games Push With Player One Purchase

WirelessGamesBlog.com is reporting this morning that ROK Entertainment (ROKE) has acquired veteran UK mobile sports games publisher Player One for an undisclosed sum. ROK, which has been primarily focused on mobile streaming video services since it's launch in 2004, has recently been bolstering its ROK 8 games subsidiary... in August the company announced a distribution agreement with Inspired Gaming Group. With regard to the Player One purchase ROK Chairman and CEO Jonathan Kendrick, said “Mobile gaming is proving to be evermore popular worldwide, so we are delighted to add Player One to our portfolio of revenue-generating mobile products and we look forward very much to the successful deployment of their existing library of world-class mobile games as well as developing new games, going forward.” In theory this diversification strategy isn't a bad idea, since games do continue to have the best business model in the mobile entertainment space (and video might have the worst one, frankly). The challenge here is that Player One isn't exactly on the bleeding edge of mobile gaming... they're a very UK-centric, old-line Java games house (they have 1 title in the US iTunes App Store).... and they've been pretty quiet lately. So for ROK to maximize the financial potential from this acquisition they absolutely must invest some money to make Player One more relevant in the post-carrier-dominated, smartphone app store, world. Overcoming this challenge will be a non-trivial task for ROK, since the company is definitely not rolling in cash.