@ FT Mobile: The Boys’ Toys Session

Erm, this session covers games, girls and gambling. I thought that meant guns, breasts and poker (shall we tag those?) so didn’t expect to be in the target audience. But speakers have repeated that there isn’t much difference in behaviour between the genders, and one of the first stats was that 40 per cent of Yahoo! Games users are female, if you think that’s any kind of significant yardstick.
LaNetro Zed regional MD Richard Hancock outlined three types of mobile games user:
– the casual consumer who goes for simple, known concepts and is a fickle user, often put off by confusing pricing and bad usability.
– users loyal to specific brands and games, and to those related online communities.
– hardcore users who want mobile games to be as close as possible to the real thing. These are low users of mobiles because the user experience isn’t good enough.
Sebastien de Halleux of Glu (publishers of Ice Age 2, Sonic the Hedgehog amongst others) showed a video of responses from mobile users on why they don’t download games on their mobiles. Users said they don’t know how to, don’t have time, don’t want to pay more money, one had a faulty download and lost their money and several people said they play online instead.
— I was about to disagree when Hancock said that mobile has the opportunity to deliver content to a new audience because people don’t have access on other platforms. Only he was talking about Asia and Pakistan in particular; web penetration is less than one per cent but mobile is in the mid-20s and growing. Fair enough.

This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.

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