Two weeks ago I bemoaned the fact that no-one was integrating mobile gaming into other forms of gaming, merely doing mobile versions of games. I was contacted by a company which is doing exactly that — and was unsurprised to find it was a Russian company. There’s a lot of innovative stuff coming out of Russia, which used to surprise me because it doesn’t have 3G networks yet.
Anyway, Fedor Soprunov — the CEO of Mobimon — contacted me about his company which allows you to train characters on your mobile and then pit them against other players on an online server. “My primary interest was to create system that will help people to build community, based on a new potential of mobile phones,” Soprunov told MocoNews via e-mail. “We’ve made two applications that should demonstrate whether this thought is right or not. The first and, in my opinion, the most significant, is our MobiMon game. The second is the map of Moscow based on user-generated content.”
Mobimon is currently looking for business partners (it’s currently on one Russian site, 3sider). “MobiMon now is a facility, an interface, attracting more customers by allowing them to play online computer games on their cell phones,” said Soprunov. “It’s not a lot of fun just to train character and send your results to the server. And of course a lot of diverse mobimons will look more funny.” It’s not just attracting new customers…if someone is keen on a multiplayer online game they’d probably be willing to fork out a few bucks a month to train up their character when they’re away from their computer…another revenue stream for game companies.
Mobimon uses SMS as well as data transfer to move the characters from the server to the handset — it’s only the stats that have to be moved regularly, after all. Soprunov described it as “thin client — fat server”.
Soprunov is convinced that the applications which will be successful on mobile phones are ones that use the devices power to communicate — with people or machines. “The real services, the ones that will be in need, will connect mobile to something else, enhancing value of both mobile and computer applications,” he said. “After all, cell phone should be, in all aspects, a communicating device, the same as computer. I think that we are witnessing that the Hi-Tech Internet is becoming a normal people’s socializing tool — I think that this is the essence “Web 2.0″. Before, in my opinion, most of internet fans were much more hardcore than now.”
I agree with this. In terms of mobile games (and mobile content in general) there are two successful types: The type that gives people something to do when they’re bored and the type that lets people do things with the specific characteristics of the mobile. The first type will be popular — as evidenced by the preponderance of casual mobile games — but it will be a high-volume low unit return business…a lot of casual games are given away free. The second type will have smaller audiences but higher per-unit returns and will make use of the most fundamental aspects of mobile phones — the fact that they are communication devices that people carry everywhere with them.
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