There’s been an interesting confluence of commentary on mobile games, from people who are all saying the same thing but from different places in the marketplace, with with different conclusions.
The first one I noticed was a Guardian interview with Jon Hare, creator of Sensible Soccer, who is very unimpressed with the mobile platform. “Mobile games are the most licence driven pile of shit you’ve ever seen. You can’t sell a mobile game unless it has a license attached. Mobile is the worst format for gaming.” Apparently that’s only the stuff that was fit to print…His response is just to avoid the mobile as a game platform altogether. There’s some interesting comments on the post here.
Then of course there’s Trip Hawkins, who also thinks that most mobile games are licence driven piles of shit — and I’m sure he’s used almost exactly that phrase at one time or another. However, his response is to say that mobile games can be good if done correctly and to produce games developed specifically for the mobile platform (we all know he thinks that means simplicity and social networks). He points out that only 5% of the people who watch the Superbowl play Madden, and twice that number play fantasyag football…
Modojo has also interviewed Jason Ford about his move to Namco. Although he doesn’t slam into mobile games in this piece he’s well known for doing so. So, about his move to a company that pretty much focuses on porting its arcade classics to mobile? “I’m extremely excited about being here with Namco. I’ve known Namco for five years now, since I arrived at Sprint,” Ford said. “When I came to Sprint five years ago I took a west coast trip to visit all the major game publishers — EA, Midway, THQ, all of them — to pitch them on the idea of mobile gaming. Only one of them said ‘yeah, let’s do this’ and that was Namco.” Plus, everyone knows Namco’s brands…Pacman is the icon of an entire music genre.
The lesson from this is that Namco licences are different from other licences. First, they’re licences of games rather than movies, and not high-end console games but games that were developed for machines that were less capable than today’s mobile phones. Second, and most importantly, Namco doesn’t have to pay a ludicrous amount of money to a third party to develop the game, so it can afford to put more into actual game quality. There are some great mobile games, saying “mobile games suck” almost always means “most of them”.
So, I think mobile games will do fine once people stop thinking solely about licences. Is there evidence for this? I’ll let Trip have the last say:
“You know, we went through exactly the same phenomenon in the ’80s. Atari paid $20 million for the rights to build an “ET” game for the Atari 2600 console figuring that such a game couldn’t miss. Then they gave the programmers seven weeks to build the game and, of course, it never lived up to the public’s expectations. It sounds like mythology but it’s true — Atari had so much excess inventory of the stupid game that it had to bury them all in an Arizona landfill site.”
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