MGF 2008: The state of mobile gaming now

The keynote session of the first day of Mobile Games Forum 2008 was a panel debate, featuring representatives from Vodafone, Orange, EA Mobile, Eidos and Fishlabs.

The subject: EVERYTHING. Well, the state of the mobile games industry and how it's going, anyway.

So, how was 2007?

Vodafone's Suresh Sudera kicks off.

"The market is seeing a slowdown in growth. We've been very lucky for the first five years of mobile games, but that is tailing off now. So we're putting in place an understanding of how we can address those issues, and what efficiencies we can put in place. Operators are not retailing products as they should be, they're just distributing products, and that's what we want to address in 2008," he reckons

Numbers? He says the growth rate has decreased by 50 per cent, although when pressed, he won't say exactly what that rate is. "You could say it's between 20 and 30 per cent," he eventually admits.

Orange's Neil Holroyd chips in saying that UK mobile games sales as a whole only grew by 3 per cent in 2007. This is just mobile operator sales, and apparently the figure comes from ELSPA.

Fishlabs' Michael Schade is next up, talking from a developer's point of view.

"In 2007, the discussion was casual casual casual casual, maybe because PC and console had an emphasis on casual gaming. We believe it's important to monetise more from each mobile user, which you can do with hardcore games, with extra level downloads and other content. We need a casual segment and a high-end segment, with different price points," he says.

EA Mobile's Tim Harrison, says 2007 was a very strong year for the publisher (he said this in our feature earlier this week too). However, EA is keen to find new channels to sell mobile games, since the established channels aren't growing organically any more.

'It's almost becoming a cliche at conferences to say 'This is the year when everything changes', but we are starting to see some things having macro effects on the industry. New channels are being enabled, but we need to go further in that way', he reckons.

Next up is Simon Protheroe from Eidos.

"We have noticed that the threshold for success for any title is much higher than it used to be. Costs are going up, but it's just deployment issues, covering an increasingly fragmented handset base, rather than making better quality games or putting more resources into the creative process," he says. "It's very difficult for innovation to succeed. We're seeing a lot of console tie-ins, movie games... And a lot of those aren't very innovative, let's be honest."

Moderator Kristian Segerstrale now picks on Mike Yuen, Qualcomm's BREW gaming guru, who's sitting in the audience. What's his view on the state of the industry?

"In North America the trends are pretty much the same. Most of the publishers we're dealing with there are pretty flat too [in terms of revenues]. I don't think the industry is slowing down though: I'm a glass half-full kinda guy," he says.

He also wangs a question back to the panel: why don't mobile operators give more figures out on how many games they're selling? Retailers in other industries do.

Suresh says Vodafone is fair and open with its publisher partners on a one-to-one basis, but can't publicly share those numbers, for 'obvious reasons'. He doesn't say what those reasons are, mind.

"The top five or six players in the marketplace who are seeing substantial growth are getting the casual-branded mix absolutely right, and because of that they are growing," he continues. "Getting that mix right is what's going to grow the industry. Touchscreen devices are coming, we're launching a lot of them, and publishers need to start developing for them, to get that 'Wii effect' of new gamers coming in."

So, how else will the industry grow? Holroyd says the growth of the mobile internet is a big factor in the lack of growth for mobile games - operators focused their attentions on internet rather than games - but that it's now an opportunity.

"Social interaction is one of the huge opportunities for growth, letting users see high score tables and interact in other ways," he says.

Also, in the UK, he thinks pay-as-you-go customers are being left out by the price of mobile games, which means cheaper games and rental models will be important.

Schade agrees that social gaming will be hugely important, as will more flat-rate data plans so gamers aren't worrying about how much money they're spending playing connected games.

"To drive that, we need more services like Nokia N-Gage and environments to download those games, and accept this may run on a limited number of handsets. And also different price points. On mobile, we are already on the level of Nintendo DS, but we're still charging five Euros," he points out.

The operators step in to say that they're introducing flat-rate data tariffs, but Sudera says there's a wider problem of awareness - people don't know how to download mobile games, or what's available. N-Gage is showing some more awareness, because you have premium placement on the device, which is a start. In 2008, you will see more of that coming from operators as well, possibly Vodafone, where games have a presence on the device. Also, towards 2008 building the social networking elements, like you see on Facebook.

Interesting indeed. Watch that space, in other words.

Sudera also says he wants to work with other operators to use the internet and social networking sites like Facebook to generate more awareness of mobile games.

"I really do expect to see more call-to-action from web to mobile this year," he says.

Tim Harrison doesn't think the panel has talked enough about the OEM channel (i.e. handset manufacturers). N-Gage is great, but it's one single manufacturer. What he thinks is more interesting is when they deliver service offerings that move onto the web. He agrees with Sudera that awareness is a huge issue - people have to know about the great mobile games that are out there, which means better discovery and retailing on the operator portals.

Harrison also says micro-transactions are interesting, and they're already being used in South Korea (i.e. play a game for free, but pay for items and in-game content).

Simon Protheroe agrees with most of the above, and says reaching new consumers is going to be the source of most growth. He thinks connected elements won't be restricted to hardcore gamers either.

"Casual gamers do communicate," he says, citing Facebook apps as an example.

I think we're going to hear a lot about Facebook over the next two days; it's a veritable buzzword.

Now questions from the audience: how can word of mouth work better? If a friend has a really good mobile game, and you're on a different operator, how do you find it?

Holroyd says the operators are working together in the UK to remedy this. Interestingly, he says their scheme to launch games on the same day across all operators tailed off due to resource issues. Hopefully it will kick off again later this year.

Someone asks Protheroe what examples he has of good 'multi-touch' games - games which work between the mobile and PC or console versions. And gets an intriguing reply: Protheroe says Eidos is working on integrating Championship Manager on mobile and PC.

"You've got the rich PC interface for the full experience, but you've got your mobile interface for making quick changes to your team selection and so on. That's an ongoing process," he reveals.

Now we're onto how operator decks should evolve, and Harrison makes the point that online, you see what you want to see (think customised Facebook profiles or Netvibes style homepages). But on mobile, the portal that you see when buying games is still to some extent dictated by one or a few people within that operator.

3's Xavier Louis is in the audience, and is asked for an operator view - can the portals be a bit more flexible? 3 is tweaking its portal according to times of the day - e.g. more poker stuff in the evening - but not so much customised for individual users.

"We're only now getting the tools in place to do that," says Holroyd. It seems even the simple aspect of presenting you with a different list of games whether you're male or female hasn't been possible until now.

A chap from the audience upbraids the panel for not looking outside their own industry - the theory, they should be signing deals with the likes of Coca-Cola, and offering prizeplay with appealing prizes. You may have guessed, he's from a company that offers prizeplay technology.

"We have run prizeplay, and it's not been as successful as we hoped," says Sudera. "That's why we aren't talking much about it today. Prizeplay is not high on the agenda."

As moderator, Segerstrale is doing a great job of picking on interesting people in the audience - now he gets Nokia's Mark Olila to have his say.

"We'll be focusing more on targeting the consumers and opening up our channels to allow game developers and publishers to leverage what we've got in the market," Olila says. "Try and buys, embeds, all the elements for generating revenue."

How about user ratings? Holroyd says that all the operators now have the ability to let users rate games, and cites Disney's Cars as one example of a game that got very low ratings.

Sudera says that Vodafone is using a little-known site called Pocket Gamer, but doesn't have user ratings yet. But he says as Vodafone moves more towards social networking style elements, that will help.