Birds (sic!) do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, and now even Oprah (have you been there before her? Check here)… so: what about mobile games companies tweeting? Now, there’s many of them already out there (see list below) but how much sense does it make (that it makes sense for your business I demonstrated recently)?
With the conference season upon us, I shall be trekking to my former hometown of Hamburg on Monday to join the good folks from the Casual Games Association for their European iteration of Casual Connect. It looks like a pretty cool show with lots of interesting stuff going on, in particular also on social gaming and cross-platform initiatives: they have numerous panels and keynotes on both and a whole strand on mobile. Interesting speakers, too: Rob Unsworth (Digital Chocolate), Ami Ben-David (Oberon/I-Play), Philippe Dao (Gameloft) are there plus an interesting panel with Fishlabs’ Michael Schade and Handy Games’ Christopher Kassulke on the same panel (their two companies had a little bit of a tiff recently). I’ll be there to elaborate a bit more on mobile social gaming… Fingers crossed.
I’ll be giving a presentation at Casual Connect Europe in a few weeks and have hence been looking a little at the concept of social gaming. In particular with the iPhone success story, this concept has received its fare share of the limelight recently – and rightly so: the unique distinguishing factor of a mobile phone is that it is always with its owner and that it’s always on, making it the perfect tool for connecting with people (well, this is what they were invented for in the first place), and the iPhone does that well not only with voice or SMS…
Mobile games developer & publisher Digital Chocolate has started to port some of its games over to the PC format in order to allow players a flavour of it prior to committing to pay. Users can play the game as an online Java version for free. They can then choose to purchase it as a downloadable PC product ($9.99) or – directly from the website – on mobile (prices will probably vary per country/operator).
It is yet again a try to get word out to the gaming community by more than just placing the games on as many mobile operator portals as possible (which is still where the majority of games are being sold). Digital Chocolate have been on the forefront here: their Facebook adaptation of their hit title TowerBloxx has found a huge following on the social network. There is no information (or at least none available to me) to tell if this leveraged sales of the title on mobile, too, but it is a good way to bypass the very limited space that carriers’ WAP portals can allow.
The online trial version is a sweet idea although one could say that some connected features and high-score tables (as available on said Facebook app) might add a little more flavour. I suppose any premium PC sales will add incremental revenue. From a mobile game developers’ perspective, it is only one more port after all, a laugh compared to the hundreds and hundreds of handsets that need to be supported.
Well done, guys!
It’s been the buzz for some time but no one had, with few exceptions, been seeing too much of it but now it seems to start taking off: cross-platform convergence of games. It is a bit of a holy grail: the network operators (or carriers) are not always the most creative and daring bunch when it comes to trying things out and they take a very healthy cut of the revenues from a tough, fragmented and still relatively small market. No wonder then that a lot of people are praying for alternative solutions. But, alas, it never really worked: every games publisher will tell you that, other than for music, wallpapers, etc, the direct-to-consumer model never really worked for games; the operators dominate the space as the, by far, most important distribution channels.
This could be, one thinks, overcome when more users would actually get themselves familiar with the games in a less constrained environment, the web being an immediate answer. Many have tried, many have failed (even the superstars of mobile games, Gameloft, stopped their in-house offering). But, hey, maybe it was just the wrong approach. Trip Hawkins‘ brainchild Digital Chocolate showed with their approach to their award-winning game TowerBloxx how it can also be done: they created a Facebook app and an online Flash version of the game that have been roaring successes: allegdely, the Flash game saw more than 10 million plays to date and the Facebook app has had 430,000 lifetime users. For a property that sprung from mobile, these are very respectable numbers indeed. And whilst I have no idea if it actually helped selling more games (300,000 clicked the “buy now” button but, for some odd reason, they don’t know how many actually bought it), it will have played its part to keeping the game in the front of people’s minds – and that’s half the work done, isn’t it?
Other players are onto it, too: online gaming giant Oberon Media bought mobile publisher I-Play last year in order to offer a more comprehensive line-up across media boundaries. Real is doing similar things. It is probably only a question of time before EA connects its pogo.com online destination with its mobile titles. I also know of quite a few smaller developers that start to very actively incorporate the multi-platform into their game design and development considerations. Very encouraging, that is!
And it makes so much sense of course: handsets get more and more powerful, the garden walles gardens start to come down with flat-rate data plans for mobiles becoming more and more the rule: all in all, a perfect runway for the ascent of convergent media consumption.
Now let’s add (mobile) Flash to the equation, and things could become very interesting indeed… (and, yes, I know, we may not yet have the install base but it’s getting there…)
