I’m at the Mobile Entertainment Summit (MES) hosted by iHollywood (finally recovering from a terrible flight). Anyway, the first speaker was Mitch Lasky from EA (ne Jamdat) who started with his now familiar spiel that there need to be fewer mobile games of higher quality. He also said that small companies which were creating games that targeted people who play Tetris, which meant they were competing with him and other entrenched players — they should be creating different and innovative games which will “create and capture new demand”. Apparently the mobile games market is only 2.5% of mobile phone users, and is only growing because the installed user base is growing.
Mitch is also tired of the “increase ARPU, reduce churn” marketing of mobile games, and proposed an “emotional attachment” idea instead. He listed products and services that people formed an emotional attachment to (iPod, Blackberry, Starbucks, TiVo, HBO), and pointed out that these services were relatively expensive… “Being cool can command a serious premium.”
So he’s proposing that good mobile games mean that people will form an emotional attachment to their mobile phone… possibly, but people already have an emotional attachment to their phone, what is needed is an emotional attachment to the service.
There’s also a problem with the current system of selling most content through the operator decks. He told an anecdote of a company that created a good mobile poker game, and ran ads everywhere promoting the game and saying “go look for it on Verizon’s Get It Now service”. When people saw the ad and logged onto the service the game at the top was Jamdat’s Downtown Texas Hold’em, and they bought that game assuming it was the one the ads were talking about. Great for Jamdat in the short term, but Mitch seemed to realise it was bad for the industry — it discouraged promotion of games and it discouraged innovation. Developers have to be able to tell people how to get their product in an easy and intuitive way, and that’s very difficult if they’re trying to promote them through the carrier decks. Off portal sites will be necessary for the industry to promote itself…
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