Mobile gaming – the troubled teenage years
Stuart Dredge
 
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Stuart Dredge is a technology writer with eight years of journalistic experience across various online and print publications. His key areas of knowledge are mobile entertainment (including games) and consumer technology – fields in which he has also worked as an analyst. He now covers mobile gaming as a freelance writer for several industry publications, edits the mobile games section of consumer website Pocket Gamer and covers consumer technology for Tech Digest. In his receiver contribution, Dredge takes a look at the future of mobile gaming, focusing on how mobile games could move beyond the familiar hits like Tetris and Pac-Man to new concepts blending innovation and connectivity.
 
 
 
Three or four years ago, games were The Next Big Thing in the mobile world. Operators were portraying phones as a games console in your pocket, hundreds of developers were creating mobile games and everyone was expecting to make big money from mobile gaming.

Fast forward to the present, and the hype around mobile games has moved on – it's now mobile TV, music and social networking that get everyone excited. According to industry analyst M:Metrics, 4.2% of UK mobile users downloaded a mobile game in August this year. This figure was 2.6% in Germany, 4.8% in Spain, and just 1.1% in France. This represents millions of people still, but it's not the runaway success many were hoping for. If the last three years can be described as mobile gaming's infancy, then it's now into its troubled teenage years.
 
 
 
To understand how to negotiate these teenage years, it's useful to look at what traits characterised mobile gaming's infancy. One word sums it up: familiarity. Mobile users have bought games that are familiar, whether based on retro games (Tetris, Pac-Man) or more current brands such as films, console games and board games. A glance at the top 10 best-selling mobile games in any country will usually reveal a list of familiar brands.

Why are these familiar games so popular? It's mainly due to the way mobile games are sold on operator portals, direct-to-consumer websites and print/TV advertising. Consumers rarely have more than a screenshot and a couple of lines of text on which to base their purchasing decision, so it's no surprise to see them making safe choices rather than risk their 5 Euros on something unknown. Tetris and Pac-Man need little explanation to most consumers of a certain age.

Creatively speaking, there is another reason why these retro games are so well suited to mobile. They have simple 2D graphics and constrained playing areas, which work well on a small mobile screen, and also four-way digital movement, which suits the mobile keypad. Pac-Man and Tetris are not just familiar to users, their gameplay experience does not disappoint when translated to a phone, in stark contrast to some attempts to port modern-day console games with their 3D graphics and analogue controls.

So how do mobile games need to evolve now? The first way relates directly to the point above. Developers are focusing on creatively working within the restrictions of mobile phones, taking inspiration from the simple gameplay mechanics of the retro games, while creating new and original IP for mobile. A few examples of games that are already out: Gamevil's "NOM" and "Skipping Stone", which pioneered the "one-thumb" mobile game, which needs only one button to play; Digital Chocolate's "Tower Bloxx" and "Rollercoaster Rush", which riff on the same concept; RealArcade's "Playman" series of casual sports games; Glu Mobile's "Super KO Boxing", and the batch of brain-training games which have come out recently. All these games use mobile's constrained screen and less-than-ideal controls as a strength rather than a weakness.
 
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