This was the last panel for me today…it included Alan Duggan from Nephin Games, Harry Kargman from Kargo, Tammy Robinson from Verizon Wireless, Scott Jensen from mForma and the moderatore was Drew Hull from NPD Group.
The big issue seemed to be the slowdown in growth…”Growth has normalized,” said Tammy. “It’s good for our industry because it means we’re maturing.” If the mobile game market is mature it’s the runt of just about any litter you care to place it in — I’m sure most people in the industry were hoping and expecting it would be a little bigger once it had reached maturity. Still, I like a positive world view…
Tammy went on to say that there are still are large number of people who don’t realise what is possible on mobile phones, and that it is an education issue. Harry agreed with her: “We’ve sort of hit a wall today as of growth. It’s an educating problem, most people are just starting to text message for the first time, and if they’re doing that they’re not going to buy mobile content…it requires marketing and it requires and easy way for people to find those games and download them.” He also pointed out that it was the early adopters that were driving the industry, but now there are other things (music, video, TV) for those people to adopt, and the people which normally follow the early adopters and take an industry mass market haven’t arrived.
It sounds to me like the mobile game industry grabbed the low hanging fruit, both in terms of the games it bought to mobile and the customers it attracted. There has been a lot of relying on brands the past few years and porting over simple games like Tetris. Likewise, there are some people who will do anything on a mobile phone and some people who will play any game they can get their hands on…but that’s not the mass market. There’s still plenty of opportunity, but the industry is going to have to work for it — I think the big growth spurt is still ahead.
The panel was asked about multiplayer games that weren’t on the carrier deck…it’s easy to get the download to somebody but a lot harder for the company to allow its customers to interact with each other. Alan replied that his strategy was to operate at the highest end of latency that he could. “We don’t focus on head-to-head but on shared experience.” He said you also needed to be whitelisted by the carriers. Tammy responded that it was important for carriers to protect their networks. “It’s really difficult for a multibillion dollar company to trust a lot of little companies,” she said.
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