February 9th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Events & Conferences | No Comments »
Today we continue our reporting on Casuality-West this week in Amsterdam. I-Play’s CEO David Gosen has held an excellent speech in which he describes why mobile is THE gaming platform of the future.
David started off by defining mobile games in the current gaming market. Where console and PC games are played like a full three course dinner, mobile was clearly the snack. Delivering a full experience on its own and ready for quick consumption. Mobile is experience driven and a good game should hook the consumer in 60 seconds. Mobile is also a mass market community device as mobile devices outsell consoles, pc’s and even TV’s by many times each year. Also the replacement cycle is much shorter with a 12 to 18 months average.
Describing the market, David explained the market is currently shaking out; meaning weak competition is clearing out and the remaining players in it are ready to ride the wave as the market is now starting to get serious with 3G available on most networks globally. “The market is driven by consumers, enabled by technology”.
Consumers in this market are promiscuous though when it comes to mobile games (no, he didn’t mean they jump into bed with just anyone). The consumer we deal with is active, impatient, experimental, savvy and love personalization. Emotions we have to play into.
The current market also allows brand owners to enter new revenue channels. Existing partnerships evolve to meet brand owner demands. I-Play recognizes this by offering video content next to mobile games. I-Play is Universal’s biggest partner for this project they called ‘Mobile Moments’.
For operators, the data market is important. With fierce competition on voice services, data is the money maker in the near future. David expects fixed price plans for data usage to roll out soon offering ‘all you can eat’ models.
I-Play itself is focused mostly at casual games. For mobile this not only means they have to be simple and intuitive, but also it means that the so called One Thumb rule is applied when designing the games. One Thumb gaming means that games are played with using just one finger, which is mostly active on the d-pad.
During the speech, David also pointed us at some internal sales data. The Fast and the Furious games for example have sold more then six million times. With every release, the market and number of distribution channels was clearly growing as the turnover at release was every time about twice as high as the last part in the graph David showed. Looking at casual games, Jewel Quest did well over 2 million downloads which is still ongoing. I-Play remains to keep its biggest titles up to date by regularly releasing additional ports. David also showed us the success of I-Play’s own IP based games. 3D Pool, developed by Distinctive, did well over 1 million downloads to date. Freestyle Motocross, developed by Xedex, performed the same. Currently the best selling original IP on Verizon is My Dog.
