Building Mobile Gaming Communities

Andy Riedel from InfoSpace Mobile has penned a piece about mobile game communities and how to build them. He makes the obvious point that casual games will be the biggest market, but I’m not sure they can be considered “multi-player” which seems to come through in the article. Things like scoreboards are great, but they’re not really multi-player — for a game to be multi-player different people who are playing have to be able to affect each others game.
Anyway, he offers some really good ideas: “What mobile games need is a voice! 3G was trumpeted as grand unification; text and voice as uniformly formatted packets running over the same network pipes. The ability to operate VoIP services within games could soon be a reality. Voice chat will be a key differentiating feature in the mobile games market, as it will tie mobile games back to the core feature of the phone itself.” Although the handset will be in a different location to what people are used to for making voice calls this issue is already being address with video calls, so it shouldn’t be an issue. And that would definitely make real-time multi-player games more fun.
He also suggests a loyalty program is needed to keep people coming back…”Not everyone is an expert gamer. Remember this is largely a casual oriented market and people crave instant gratification. Loyalty point programs are becoming an increasingly popular mechanism to encourage players to remain subscribers over many months.” Integration with computer games will also become important…
Related stories:
Mobile Gaming Mustn’t Be Ignored
GDC Europe: Yahoo Games Gone Mobile
Uphill Struggle For Mobile Gaming

Comments have been disabled for this post