Mobile games company Nazara Technologies* has extended its exclusive partnership with Electronic Arts (EA) to the Middle East region. While the terms of the deal or the deal period were not disclosed, this deal will provide Nazara exclusive rights to distribute various EA Mobile titles across its carrier partners in the Middle East including Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Etihad Etisalat (Mobily), Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (du) and Viva (Bahrain) as well as third party channels, aggregators and retail channels in the Middle East region. The titles offered include various EA Mobile games like the Java and Android versions of EA Mobile's Need For Speed: The Run and EA SPORTS FIFA 12 at launch. Nazara - EA Deal: In July 2010, Nazara had inked a similar tie-up with Electronic Arts for India, Sri Lanka & Bangladesh regions, giving Nazara the rights to distribute EA Mobile catalog to carriers, third party channels, aggregators, retail channels and local OEMs in these three countries. It had also claimed to have a 40% marketshare in India, serving 200,000 game downloads a day. Among the titles offered in this deal included popular titles like Tetris, Bejeweled, The Sims, Need For Speed, Monopoly, Yahtzee, Madden NFL Football, FIFA Soccer and NASCAR. In India, Nazara has partnerships with Airtel, Spice, Idea, Vodafone, BPL, Tata Indicom, Reliance Communications and Spice Digital. It had also partnered with the handset maker Micromax to pre-embed 40 EA game titles on select handsets on a try and buy model with Nazara handling both the distribution and payments. These games offered five free trials initally, following which it was priced…
