I like some mobile games but only to fill the time when waiting! I don't like gaming outside of my home...
The Road to E3: Mobile Gaming
By
Laura Parker, Associate Editor
We count down to the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo with a series of features about the issues affecting the future of the games industry.
Mobile gaming has come a long way since Snake or BrickBreaker. The attempt at turning mobile phones into handheld gaming devices has long been a defining factor in the consumer electronics race, aiming to marry expediency and entertainment to create a new market for the gaming industry. When Snake launched as the first preinstalled mobile phone game in 1997, it became an instant hit; according to Nokia, the game now exists on more than 350 million mobile phones. But even though mobile gaming had finally found an audience, technological limitations would prevent mobile phones from becoming a viable gaming platform for at least another decade. It wasn't until Apple launched its iPhone in 2007 that everything finally changed.
Today, mobile gaming holds a growing percentage of the global gaming market. Almost everyone owns a mobile phone, and an increasing number of devices support Internet access and high-quality graphics and sound. Smartphones are also beginning to gain a larger percent of the market share, giving more and more people access to app stores full of bite-sized gaming experiences tailor-made for the mobile platform. The games industry has responded accordingly: an increasing number of publishers are setting up separate mobile businesses in a bid to reach out to the growing audience, and mobile gaming has become one of the most promising areas for game developers. But just what will this growth mean for the future of the gaming industry? Will mobile gaming carve out its own niche? Or will it integrate itself into the current industry and blur the lines between core and casual gaming? This feature will look at some of the biggest names in mobile gaming today, including Angry Birds developer Rovio, Ngmoco, and Fruit Ninja developer Halfbrick.
The Flurry study. [Image credit: Flurry]
The Mobile Revolution
Last month, US mobile analytics service Flurry found that the iOS and Android game sales market grew from 5 percent in 2009 to 8 percent in 2010 in the US, with revenue climbing from US$500 million to US$800 million in the same period. According to the analysis, not only are mobile games gleaning a growing portion of the video game market share in the US, but they also seem to be surpassing PC game sales, which earned only US$700 million from 2009 to 2010. The figures also show that iOS and Android game sales are catching up to portable game sales: when compared to the Nintendo DS and Sony's PlayStation Portable, Android and iOS market share climbed from 19 percent in 2009 to 34 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the DS fell from 70 percent in 2009 to 57 percent in 2010, while the PlayStation Portable fell from 11 percent to 9 percent in the same period. Moving internationally, information technology research firm Gartner predicted that the worldwide mobile gaming market is expected to reach US$11.4 billion by 2014 (jumping from US$4.7 billion in 2009 and US$5.6 billion in 2010).
While the number of people playing games on their mobiles is clearly on the rise, so too are the success stories coming out of the mobile game development space. Ask any average iPhone user if he or she has heard of Angry Birds, and the likely answer is an enthusiastic yes. The popular iPhone game made history earlier this year by becoming the first smartphone game to break free of the mobile category in the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Game of the Year Awards and earn a nomination for Best Game. (The game hit 140 million downloads last month). Not that anyone would know it, but Angry Birds is actually developer Rovio's 52nd title since the studio formed in 2003. In fact, no one really noticed the game when it launched on the Apple App Store in 2009. It took Rovio a lot of persuading to convince even friends and family to buy the game, something that Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio's marketing and business developer, says finally helped Angry Birds reach number one in Rovio's home country of Finland. That, and the fact that there aren't really that many iPhones in Finland to begin with.
"We underestimated development costs, and it took a lot more time and money than we thought, but I think that was the big factor behind the game's success," Vesterbacka said during a panel talk at this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. "At first, we aimed to sell a few thousand copies to cover development costs. But after it became number one in Finland, it then became number one in Sweden too, and that's how it all began."
Rovio's Angry Birds has 140 million downloads as of last month.
This was more to do with luck than anything else: during an interview on national television, a renowned Swedish skier let it slip that she'd been playing a lot of Angry Birds to pass the time while holed up in hospital recovering from an accident. Soon, the whole country followed suit, helping the game reach number one on the App Store in Sweden, then the UK, and finally, the US. Vesterbacka believes the iPhone led to a marketplace filled with good-quality games, each offering a different kind of experience.
"A few years ago at GDC there was a mobile panel and the carriers were talking about the fact that we don't need 27 poker games--we just need one good one. But that sounds a lot like communism, doesn't it? You don't need 27 brands of toothpaste, you just need one! The thing that matters is good games, not how many of them there are. Timing is important too--we've been hearing that everyone is going to have these devices [smartphones] since 2003, but it wasn't until last year that that actually came true. When you look at the gaming market now, all the action is in mobile. That's where the new trends are being defined--it's the centre of gravity for all of gaming."
However, this shift also left a lot of developers in the dark. It takes a long time to establish a new way of doing things in an industry that has been set in its ways for decades. After Angry Birds became a hit, Rovio found itself struggling with crucial decisions and questions that no one really had the answer for. Instead of following traditional business models and capitalising on their newfound success by spamming the market with dozens of Angry Birds clones, Rovio decided to drop everything else and dedicate all its time to supporting and growing the Angry Birds franchise. The first step was to release seasonal content to match with popular holidays like Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day. The team then moved on to updating game content once a month and looked for a way to keep things constantly interesting.
"Nintendo says this kind of [business] model is destroying the industry, that it makes games disposable--but that's not true," Vesterbacka says. "We don't see Angry Birds as disposable. If you look at how console games work, they're made, publishers charge for them, DLC comes out, and then that's it, it's forgotten. It cannot stay fresh. If you don't update your games regularly, it won't be very popular. But mobile games require a new way of thinking, different from games that have been through traditional development. It's more like a service as well as an experience. New ideas will emerge in the mobile space and go into other areas. We're only getting started, and there is so much opportunity to innovate."
By
Laura Parker, Associate Editor
Laura Parker is the Associate Editor of GameSpot Australia. She loves adventure games, sparkly stuff, Trivial Pursuit, cake, Master Chief, earthworms, and rhetorical questions. She once stole a sandwich from Peter Molyneux.
17 comments
Mobile gaming will never amount to the same experience as current consoles and PC. But saying that, mobile gaming can be awesomely fun in short bursts. If you're on a bus or train, a mobile device is the perfect way to keep boredom at bay. If you're going to get one of these mobile smart phone devices, I'd say go for the Xperia Play, it's so much better than the iPhone.
Seems like the introduction of handset gaming tools have had it's toll on handheld portables popularity. I don't see anything wrong with Angry Birds. I think it's a perfectly accessible game for a mainstream audience whether they're familiar or unfamiliar with Worms.
Mobile gaming is great for wasting time and that's about it. Personally, I don't get the whole Angry Birds fascination. It's a watered down version of Worms, but the 100 million people who downloaded it probably don't know that. Is it better for gaming? I think it makes little difference. These simple touch-screen games are gaining market share, sure, but when you compare the experience you get from an Infinity Blade with a Dragon Quest it's apples and oranges. I've never been immersed in a mobile game, unless, of course it's a port of a console or DS game (Civ Revolution has taken a few days of my life and rightfully so), but the experience has many caveats. Unless you put your phone in airplane mode, there are constant interruptions from texts, calls and emails. And as a hardcore gamer for my entire memorable life, mobile gaming is fun for a few minutes, but it's not for me. We all have our preferences as gamers -- the same is true for developers. As long as there are talented game-makers yearning to create something amazing, I think there will still be this separation. And that's a good thing for all of us.
Angry birds does not deserve to be so popular, nor the iphone as a gaming device. Now the 3DS and soon the NGP deserve some huge credit for revolutionizing mobile gaming.
It's almost the same thing with movies. There are a lot of people making short films, and some of them are really good. But it's not like big budget films are going anywhere.
Same old analysts. They are obsessed with total downloads. Developers are jumping into this to make an easy buck. For every Angry birds there are a 1000 pieces of crap no one wants. Sure the margins are huge, but there isn't an infinite space available for every developers to crap out these highly profitable games because the target audience doesn't really care about playing every good game out there. They care about killing time with whatever is cheap. This isn't the way to the billions you see Nintendo, EA, and Activision making, you can update Angry birds all you want. You have to develop a craving for your product so that people will actually spend their FREE time playing your game, not filling their DOWN time with it. Huge difference. Also, they look at the shrinking revenues of a portable market but don't take into account that those devices are at the end of their cycles. When the 3DS releases more high quality titles, revenues will go up. When the NGP releases revenues will go back up. All Nintendo and Sony need to do is build a phone into their future portables to stay relevant. If you can convince 1 gamer to buy a 40 dollar game you have just equaled the purchases of 40 casuals who buy 1 dollar games. Nintendo can pull down 20 million in revenue by selling a mere 500k copies of a 40 dollar game. How much money do you think New Super Mario Bros or Mario Kart made selling North of 20 million copies each, at 40 bucks a pop?
Laura Parker - are you from the past? Did you miss the last 6 years? "If you don't update your games regularly, it won't be very popular. (...) It's more like a service as well as an experience." - this has been the model for Blizzard games for a very long time now: constant updates. You cannot leave a product outdated, no matter how "old" it might be, the product still requires support and updates to keep players interested. What a game developer should be fighting is not other developers, but gamer disinterest. Just because mobile developers use that model doesn't mean they discovered something new. "...shift mainstream attitudes towards gaming. While core gamers don't necessarily look upon mobile or casual gamers with a sympathetic eye, (...) mobile titles are helping cultivate a growing audience for gaming..." - so what you're saying is that the blue ocean strategy (previously used by Nintendo during the Wii/DS era) is a smart strategy compared to trying to scavenge players from other products? Oh gee whiz, now isn't that a big surprise. Anything that expands audiences (or better said, retrieves the lost audience, because the "casuals" that come playing are people who previously lost interest in gaming since it, frankly, sucks) is a good thing - the Wii did it in '07, '08 & '09, the DS did it during its long run. So of course mobile developers would try to follow that model - make it cheap, make it fun, make it approachable and start rolling in the money.
I just got my first phone of this type last week. In fact I'm using it to place this comment. These devices are absolutely incredible. I can do anything from graphic design, use as a flashlight, all my info...ALL of it one pocket sized device... I have not used my PC at all the last Wei, save for setting up my Droid to be used as a wireless keyboard and mouse. My point is, thee devices are absolutely and indescribably amazing. The ability to play stupid games like "angry birds" (which, while fun, is nothing special) is one thing. However the ability to play PSP or ngp games on a device like this would blown down the wall between mobile gaming being casual fun and mobile gaming for hardcore gamers. AND THAT, my friends... is just a matter of a year or 3.
"spamming the market with dozens of Angry Birds clones" Angry Birds is already a clone of literally hundreds of flash games.
I use a pc, 360, ps3 and a wii dont do much mobile gaming... but let me clarify this... did they just say that mobile gaming beat pc gaming? did they? because if they did, Im going to be laughing all the way home at the superiority complex of pc fanboys. perhaps I diddnt read it right... *wipes away a tear*
Yea, I dread the day when companies give up on the fickle gaming audience and design solely for casuals. While it might make business sense eventually, it would just be horribly wrong on so many levels.
As long as companies understand that Mobile gaming isn't considered as "real gaming" among most gamers and remain focused on console/PC games and their quality, I say go nuts. Aside from some Angry Birds, Words with Friends and a few basic games, (Solitaire, Chess, etc) when I'm on break at work or just chillin while watching TV, I really have no other use for mobile/social games. Hell, I download a free game on my phone just cuz it looked cool... 5 minutes later its uninstalled. Meh :P
Conversation powered by Livefyre
Table of Contents
Fruit Ninja
Not Following
-
IP, AND
- Category:
- Action
- Release:
- Apr 20, 2010
