I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true - Dorothy Parker
|
|
|
Mobile phone games: no-one really cares
A BIG opportunity to sell games to mobile phone users is being lost, says mobile data gatherer - M:metrics. In a year, the total number of subscribers playing a game has only risen to 8.8 per cent (38.5 million) from 8.7 per cent (35.3 million).
Worse news for games publishers is the fact that, only about a quarter of those that play games on their mobile phones, are playing a game that has been downloaded rather than coming pre-installed on the handset.
Smartphones users are, however, over twice as likely to download a game than owners of regular handsets, the company observes. Equally worrying is the number of people downloading a game to their handset which actually fell in December 2007 compared to the same month in 2006.
According to the firm, only 14.4 million, or 3.3 per cent of mobile subscribers in the United States and Western Europe downloaded a game last December, versus 14.6 million (3.6 per cent) in December 2006.
By way of explanation, Seamus McAteer, a senior analyst with M:metrics, commented, "One of the greatest challenges facing publishers by the growing adoption of smartphones is the wide availability of free or pirated content for these devices."
McAteer's advice to mobile games publishers is that, "To succeed in such a market, game publishers will have to foster new models that may include subscriptions to online gaming communities, ad-funded or subsidised gaming, and physical distribution." ยต
Share this:
Share
How's about they make games worth buying and indeed are easy to play with a mobile key pad.
Success will come to game publishers if their games didn't suck so hard. My employer got me a Nokia phone that looks like a Star Trekkie communicator thing and aside from all the other design problems it has, (such as stupidly putting a primitive camera in it and no way of stopping the thing ringing in meetings without answering so I have to leave it on a quiet setting all the time), it came with three games. I tried them, and they weren't just crap, they were only demos which wanted to bug me to download a full version every time I messed with them. So I removed them.

The phone I bought (for $0.00) for myself was also a Nokia thing, but it doesn't have any moving parts, it has a sensible greyscale display that isn't washed out by strong sunlight (kinda important in the desert), and also comes with three games. Unlike the posh shiny one, these games are suited to a small display. Not that they're any good, mind you.

Advice to game publishers? Take a browse of Lemon64 and plunder some of the more fun ideas from the time before you were born. And make them available for a few pennies of your local currency. There are millions of cellphone users, and you'd just be reimplementing old ideas, so it's not as if you need premium pricing. Dopes.
I've never really seen the point of games on mobiles. They drain your battery for when you might need to make a call, the buttons are not laid out for a gaming interaction, graphics are usually poor with small screens.

Though maybe that's just me, my phone has the barest functionality (calls, phonebook, alarm-clock), my wrist-watch is likewise (time & date only).

If I wanted mobile gaming, I'd probably have bought a Nintendo DS.