Mobile games were once the darling of the mobile content industry but were left in the corner of the party as people chased the seemingly sexier mobile music and video industries, and then were claims that growth in mobile games had stalled or even dipped…which was refuted by a number of games companies. The analysts are at it again: “M:Metrics, a Seattle research company, reported the number of subscribers playing games has hit a plateau in the past year. After seeing some solid growth in 2006, the number has stalled at about 5.4 million users in August, only slightly up from a year earlier and down from a peak of 5.7 million subscribers in December 2006…Seamus McAteer, a senior analyst, said mobile-game developers need to put out more games that resonate with users, who don’t seem enamored of the latest crop of games…”We’re at a time where the free ride is over,” McAteer said” in this San Francisco Chronicle article. The article implies that mobile games will be saved by new technologies, that “by using touch screens, GPS, high-speed data networks, bigger processors, cameras and motion sensors, game developers see a potential to push the mobile-gaming business forward creatively in a big way”. The thing is, the industry doesn’t really need creativity, it needs sales and it needs playability. There are some incredibly creative mobile games around (read the article for some examples) but they haven’t really sold that well. Along those lines, I-play has released the results of a survey which found that people who play casual games are more likely to play mobile games — 22 percent of casual game players said they played games on their mobile phones and 16 percent replied “sometimes”, with the combined 38 percent comparing favorably to the industry average of 20.5 percent. So which of these approaches is right? I think both are. From my point of view, mobile games suffer from being lumped into a single homogenous mass when the reality is that games and genres differ a lot. If we think about the industry as “games on a mobile platform” it becomes clearer…every gaming platform has both casual games, complicated strategy games, intense 3D action games and so on. It is not a progression from one to the other, the different genres exist perfectly happy side by side, often sharing the same customers. Rather than focus on what will be the next big thing in mobile games developers need to focus on what will make a particular title a success…and I think most of the big developers know that.
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