Graeme Ferguson's Gaming and Wireless Outlook - Issue 194

* This newsletter was guest-edited by Graeme Ferguson, Head of Content at Vodafone

It was almost 12 months ago when I managed to piss off publishers at the ELSPA International Games Summit by saying the quality of mobile games were crap and needed to improve because customers 'weren't mugs.'

A year on and a report on the industry seems to back this up. According to industry analysts M:Metrics, the market for mobile games has peaked at around 5% of mobile users and only 20-30% of first-time mobile gamers go back again.

Frankly I’m not surprised. I'd been banging on about this long before the ELSPA event. As Vodafone's Head of Content, I've seen some dire games (surprisingly most with good, great or at least recognisable licences) that really insult the customer... our customer. But whose fault is it that mobile games could go the way of WAP games, where delivery has not matched expectation?

Again no surprise, I could point the finger at myself. The operator is blamed for not marketing enough, not sourcing the correct content, taking too much of the revenue, putting the costs of porting and testing on the publisher/developer, blah-blah-blah. I've sat on many panels at trade shows and had to put up with the familiar operator-bashing questions from some half-wit looking for somebody to blame.

But we’re all missing the fundamental point. The market will not grow and customers will not repeat-buy if the basic quality of mobile-games does not improve. Quicker access to a crap game or greater revenue share for a crap game, or fewer handsets and lower QA costs on a crap game and guess what? It’s still a crap game.

There are too many mobile games full stop. Because of this the development investment per game is often too low so the quality often never improves. Don’t agree? Here’s an indication. I met four large publishers and a studio a few months back, they all had slates for the year of between 40-60 games, about 250 games in total.

At Voda Group we launch between 6-10 games per month, about 100 across the year. Add in a few more launched locally and there is still a huge imbalance. No operator portal has room for all these games let alone the hundreds of others from the rest of the industry.

Operators such as Vodafone do not take publishers for granted. We love publishers that deliver great licences, quality games, share the costs of marketing and get them to us on time across our handset base, as they always promise they will! These are the standards we demand. Unfortunately, less competent publishers are the ones who complain the loudest - they're the ones who don't come up to this mark - and I (and they) know exactly who they are.

Here´s my advice for those who don´t agree with this... Don’t pay a fortune for irrelevant licences. Don’t re-skin old engines with even older movie brands or socially irrelevant brands and expect operators to get behind them. What next? Monkey Tennis? Inner-city Sumo? Cooking in Prison?

Rant over. Of course we are doing our bit to get the best games to as many new customers as possible, but we need our partners to come up with the goods too. New billing options such as rental and subscription as well as ‘try before you buy’ will help bring new users in, but only if the games they play are attractive, addictive and innovative.

It’s no coincidence that the mobile games top 10 looks very much the same week in, week out – customers know what they like and like what they know. Perennials such as Pac-Man, Tetris and Millionaire are well-known concepts that are ideally suited to mobile and the numbers speak for themselves.

Taito and Namco have barely released a new game since I signed our first deal four years ago but their revenues continue to grow because they focus on handset-porting and refreshing their successful brands. Plus newcomers such as Sonic, The Sims and V-Rally prove that there is also room for console brands on mobile.

We all have a vested interest in giving the customer a great gaming experience and as I said at the ELSPA nobody likes being taken for a mug, but that applies to operators as well as customers. Or as the late great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said: 'Less is more'. In mobile games, as in life, never a truer word spoken.