{"id":181,"date":"2009-01-07T14:39:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T14:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhirsch.wordpress.com\/2009\/01\/07\/silver-lining-for-games\/"},"modified":"2009-01-07T14:39:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T14:39:00","slug":"silver-lining-for-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/07\/silver-lining-for-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Silver Lining for Games&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_krrmJx627x4\/SWTMsT5uwhI\/AAAAAAAADtc\/7VFcsj0h3zU\/s1600-h\/ngage-live.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left;cursor:hand;width:146px;height:200px;margin:0 10px 10px 0;\" src=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_krrmJx627x4\/SWTMsT5uwhI\/AAAAAAAADtc\/7VFcsj0h3zU\/s200\/ngage-live.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>&#8230; And a full-blown sunblast on Christmas Day, or so it would appear as per the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcvuk.com\/press-releases\/43353\/M-BIZ-Global-Credit-Crunch-Could-Be-Boon-Time-for-Mobile-Game-Industry\">latest PR<\/a> from Try-and-Buy solution provider <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mbizglobal.co.uk\/\">M-Biz Global<\/a>. According to them, 2008 was a good year for mobile games (though I am not sure if the likes of <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.mobilegamesblog.com\/2008\/10\/mocondi-out-of.html\">MoConDi<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.casualgaming.biz\/news\/27950\/Vivendi-Games-Mobile-formerly-closed\">Vivendi Mobile Games<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.moconews.net\/entry\/419-uk-mobile-games-outfit-telcogames-in-administration\/\">Telcogames<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.mobilegamesblog.com\/2008\/11\/the-mighty-troglodytes-insolvent.html\">Mighty Troglodytes<\/a>, etc would agree). M-Biz&#8217;s numbers would rather suggest that the market may be shifting a little (or is re-focussing the better word?) towards pre-loaded trial versions of games. It is this segment that M-Biz is addressing, and it is therefore unsurprising that they saw downloads on Christmas Day soar to 6x (!) the average daily sales in the UK: a lot of people get new phones for Christmas and if something is on the handset already (a trial version), one is much more easily enticed into actually clicking that link.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>All in all, M-Biz reports a 62% increase in revenue year-on-year, and a 21.29% and 50% increase in EMEA and the UK respectively in December 2008 compared to the average of the previous 11 months. All good!\u00a0<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It tellies well with the findings open to see for everyone when looking at Apple&#8217;s AppStore: make the purchase process easy, make things transparent, and people will buy. The difference to both the AppStore and a pre-installed trial game is that it does not take the user 8+ clicks, a download, various cryptic messages (of the &#8220;this application is unsafe. Do you really want to install? Really, really, really?&#8221; ilk) to get gratification. I have mentioned on the <a href=\"http:\/\/volkersthoughts.blogspot.com\/2009\/01\/hungry-for-opinions.html\">Opinions on Mobile<\/a> blog\u00a0that I would expect this to be an area of focus for this year, and the numbers quoted by M-Biz would appear to being ample support of this.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; And a full-blown sunblast on Christmas Day, or so it would appear as per the latest PR from Try-and-Buy solution provider M-Biz Global. According to them, 2008 was a good year for mobile games (though I am not sure if the likes of MoConDi, Vivendi Mobile Games, Telcogames, Mighty Troglodytes, etc would agree). M-Biz&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[52,1350,190,237,353,398,404,530],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-app-store","tag-apple","tag-embed","tag-games","tag-m-biz","tag-mobile-content","tag-mobile-games","tag-pre-load"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-2V","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}