O2: Mobile games are deeply niche

Sometimes, you have to wonder how committed mobile operators are to gaming. Not at the level of the games managers, mind – they're doing plenty of ambitious stuff to persuade more mobile users to download games.

But higher up the chain, we sometimes get the impression that their mind is elsewhere, either because of the hype surrounding other services like music and TV, or because revenue-wise, games aren't quite on the radar yet.

The latter is seemingly the case at O2, whose head of European operations Peter Erskine was asked about gaming at the Reuters TMT summit in Paris. News.com has reported his reaction: "We have had flirtations with games, but the revenue was always deeply niche."

Ironically, here in the UK O2 has actually been one of the more active operators in recent months when it comes to games, hooking up with EA Mobile for its Mobile Monday promotion, and more recently running a competition with Vivendi Games Mobile to put an O2 customer into Crash Bandicoot's next mobile game. (Not to mention running charts with us).

Erskine's comments show that mobile games have some way to go before they're seen as a big money-spinner by the operators – although on the positive side, they also show that at least O2 is trying to widen that deep niche a bit.