@CTIA: Mike Yuen, Qualcomm, On The Attractiveness Of Emerging Greenfields Markets

I caught up with Mike Yuen, senior director of the Gaming group at Qualcomm Internet Services, at the end of CTIA to get an idea of his vision for mobile gaming. He talked a lot about emerging markets such as India and Brazil, and the fact that today’s high-end phones will be mid-range in just a few years, and then the today’s mid-range phones will become common in the emerging markets…and the cycle will continue.
According to Mike the important thing is that these markets are greenfields where the consumers have no frame of reference, so they’re not going to belittle mobile gaming as inferior to console gaming because they’ve never seen a console game.
Additionally, they don’t have any preconceived ideas as to how to buy content, so buying over the air from their carrier will seem natural.
By this stage Mike sees phones as becoming home entertainment centers, with computer abilities powerful enough that they can plug into peripherals such as a TV and game controller and give a pretty good gaming experience — a lot worse than current consoles but better than the first playstation. This form of content delivery will also inhibit piracy, according to Mike, because the games will be stored on the server with levels downloaded while the previous level is being played. That’s a lot of data, so I’m guessing unlimited data plans and subscription services are key.
He also demo’d a new feature from Qualcomm which is like hotkeys on steroids. Basically you can use the directional pad to click left or right to get content or menu choices that you’ve personalized (which is on a lot of phones), but the graphics are a lot richer and you can hook it up to the server, so it can click straight to a WAP store or a game portal.

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