Dashiro Okada, President Of Square Enix, On Mobile Games

Daishiro Okada, President and COO of Square Enix was the opening keynote at the Mobile Games Conference. He presented some statistics (in the Asian mobile market: 50% is music, gaming is 15%; 23% of North American consumers want game-capable handsets), pointing out there is a demand for mobile games — although there may be a difference between what most people want in a mobile game experience and what is being offered.
“A way to continue this leveraged interest is subscriber-based gameplay, where they’re looking to constantly provide new episodes of their games, so people always want to know what happens next,” Okada is paraphrased as saying. This could be a good idea — Mark Rein, vice president of Epic, makers of Unreal Tournament, said the cost and time needed to produce blockbuster experiences ruled out successful episodic content (BBC article) but mobiles are a different platform, and episodic content could work not just because the “episodes” can be smaller and easier to produce but because there is an easy distribution system.

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