August 22nd, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Events & Conferences | No Comments »
Iplay’s Stephane Labrunie made his keynote speech at GCDC yesterday, announcing that I-Play expects mobile sales to surpass the sales of console games by the end of the year. This, he explains, is possible as Mobile Gaming is a true mass market whereas the console market has a much smaller consumer base. Also the mobile games market is more divided. About half the players are female and about 60% of the mobile gamers, are aged between 18 and 34. Based on this, Labrunie sees a stable growth of the market. He recons in 2010, 1.7 billion paid downloads will take place with a value of 5.9 billion.
However just like Karl Woods yesterday, Labrunie also sees the big problems this industry is facing. He estimates only 5% of the users have downloaded a mobile game. 16% would probably download one, however they think pricing is way to high. Also technical problems cause the downloaders a lot of problems. That’s why Labrunie also put the focus of his speech on how the industry should react to them. Labrunie sees 3G as a new way of working, where connecting to the network is much more easy and the user can be pointed to a more safe download location. Also, he would like designers to focus more on the user. Simplicity, traction and innovation is his message to them for creating good gaming content.
