The Wright Stuff: Agony of Choice
The mobile games veteran tells the pain how he feels it
I've just finished The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. It's the second time I've read it and I'd recommend you take a look, too. It's a fascinating book and like all good business tomes, once you've read it, it all seems so obvious.
What got me particularly thinking, however, was when I looked at my operator's deck (I'll refrain from actually naming names – they are all as crap as each other so it doesn't actually matter). As you'd expect, I buy a lot of mobile games. I also generally try to buy the latest games each week and my phone is pretty up to date (a W910i, dontcha know). So I would be what in industry jargon we'd call 'a heavy user' and therefore presumably a great target for an operator to sell new content to.
If it was clever then, my operator would have built up a database of the games I like, done some simple analysis to find new games I might like (it's the sort of stuff Amazon displays as 'the things people like you also bought') and made sure my deck was free from games I've already purchased. So why is it that every time I go to the games page I see a list of the same old games, all of which I've already bought?
The reason is that the mobile games market (if we are to believe all the hype) is a casual market filled with a wide range of irregular tastes from middle-aged women to young boys. But a standard top 10 filled with Pac-Man and Tetris is unlikely to appeal to everyone in such a wide audience. What's needed is personalisation and some clever backend database systems to provide the games 'I' want to play.
This is the 'Long Tail' – the concept that says in the digital age we are no longer constrained to the 175,000 books that the shelves of the biggest book superstore can hold. Instead we can glory in the six million books currently in print, plus whatever obscure Greek tragedies or Persian medieval porno we want to order via print on demand. By taking advantage of the medium, it's possible to allow people the ability to find the exact book they want from the almost infinite supply of human endeavour.
In a similar way, the number of mobile games is large and getting larger every day. The games are relatively cheap to develop and so there should be a flowering of innovation as developers try new ideas and concepts without the weight of a $20 million budget. But if the only games people can buy are those that appear in a generic top 10, we're going to end up with a market that's completely focused on the so-called hits.
And here's the rub. Network operators now have an opportunity to deliver a completely new experience to users – by providing the games they want, directly to their phones whenever they want them. That's why it's such a shame they're squandering this huge opportunity by reducing their potentially infinite shelf space to ten slots in a generic top 10 that's dominated by Pac-Man, Tetris and the latest Hollywood blockbuster tie-in.
But, looking on the bright side, it's significant to note that in such a Long Tail situation, if the incumbent providers don't provide, it's the tech savvy start-ups such as Amazon (let's face it, now a $15 billion turnover company) that end up creating the market. It hasn't happened yet when it comes to the mobile market, but when what we have is a set of slow-moving companies that don't seem to understand the basics of what they are doing, all it will take is a sufficiently well-funded and smart new entrant to profit from the current situation.
Certainly I'll be happy to see a better quality of service. Until then though, should I buy Tetris or Pac-Man again?
After 12 years in the games industry, the last eight as head of production at I-play, Chris Wright finally has escaped. He now runs his own consultancy focusing on casual games. He thinks his greatest achievement is having climbed a Monroe, while his greatest regret is having climbed 'a' Monroe. He can be contacted at chris[at]gamesconsultancy.com All opinions expressed are the author's own.
