Mobile Gaming at MobileMonday Austin was a great session
Last MobileMonday Austin event on mobile gaming was a great one — Paul Trowe (who recently sold his company Pulse Mobile Games to SK Telecom) and Billy Cain (of Critical Mass Interactive) covered the life-cycle of mobile gaming, from conception, to development, to publishing.
It was a great, informative, straight to the point talk that opened the eyes of many, and for the rest of us, re-affirmed how hard, aggressive the mobile gaming space is. Why is mobile gaming, and the whole mobile development space so hard? There are many factors, including:
- Creating great, different, innovative, ingenious mobile applications, and more so if the application is a game, is not easy!
- Porting is hell. And will continue to be. Carriers demand that mobile applications from a publisher/developer, especially if the application is a game, to run in 85% of the handsets offered by the carrier. Many publishers buy the rights for an application that typically is written in one language/for one platform, and they must port to the rest of the platforms
- Testing, and testing and more testing for the purpose of “certification” or getting blessed by the carrier, for the purpose of being on the deck — mobile applications have better chance of succeeding if they are just a few clicks away, and this is more important on gaming-like applications, for which carriers are constantly rotating based on the number of downloads
- Related to the above bullet, the typical time to get to a carrier’s deck (again, this applies more to game-like mobile applications) is about 11 months, due to the sequence of testing and certifications game producers must go through… and once the game is out it might take 3-4 months to see the first check. This is why you see EA and similar game companies dominating this space, because to develop a good game, and survive the process takes real deep pockets
- The typical kind of people that network carriers put in charge of mobile gaming are not gamers themselves. Thus they don’t get it. You know, gaming is a totally different “religion”. And important decisions on game placing, who makes it on deck vs. not, are being made based on slide-presentations, brand-name, and other (favors), vs. actually trying the games
- Brand takes precedence for network carriers, making the life of small developers harder. Important to note is that brand not always equates to a great game, and that there are a lot of small, great game creators out there
- It was interesting to learn that an OK-successful game is one with around 100K downloads. And that a hit is one with more than a million downloads. And guess what game is one of the best mobile games ever? The answer is Tetris! Yeap, a casual game
I want to thank Paul and Billy for taking the time to come speak to us, and educate us on mobile gaming development! And I many thanks to Movero Technology for providing the menu, and the Austin Wireless Alliance for the drinks and appetizers.
ceo
September 20th, 2007 at 8:40 am
I didn’t know that Pulse was sold to SK Telecom. Great News. Mobile Games still is the mainly kind of application being developed in mobile space. But as you said, survive in this market is very very dificult. Companies are merging and being acquired and market is becoming more mature. Here in Brazil, is almost impossible to survive selling games only in Brazilian carriers. Get a publisher, get acquired or get out the biz.
September 20th, 2007 at 9:27 am
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptLast MobileMonday Austin event on mobile gaming was a great one — Paul Trowe (who recently sold his company Pulse Mobile Games to SK Telecom) and Billy Cain (of Critical Mass Interactive) covered the life-cycle of mobile gaming, … [...]