FOCUS MARKETING
FOCUS MARKETING
Breakout
LBiQ sat down with him for breakfast to discuss industry change and how new trends in online social behaviour are helping to highlight ever-richer opportunities for advertising supported mobile experiences.
With the content distribution dominance of the operator portals looking shot to pieces, the mobile gaming industry stands on the verge of even more phenomenal growth. Branded mobile gaming opportunities suddenly seem more attractive than ever, but how best to go about it?
In LBiQ 1.1, we looked at the success of the online gaming sector in general. Now, as Juniper Research tips the value of the global mobile games market to rise to € 5.7 billion by the end of next year, it seems appropriate to take a more detailed look at this particular segment of the gaming market. After all, it’s a market which generates more mobile revenue in the UK than music, video and wallpaper content combined.
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The mobile gaming market has been dominated since its inception by the mobile network operators. Around 90% of games sold via handsets last year were through their portals (or ‘decks’) and this has resulted in a scenario where only a handful of games can easily gain mass distribution. But now, as users become more familiar with the mobile web and data tariffs come down, a more open model of direct-to-consumer distribution is opening up with benefits not just for
developers and publishers but also for brands considering advergaming opportunities. Kristian Segerstråle was managing director of Glu Mobile – one of the world’s leading mobile games publishers – until August 2007 when he left to found social gaming venture Playfish. The first game to come out of Playfish, the Facebook-based Who Has The Biggest Brain? is currently in the social network’s top twenty applications worldwide in terms of daily players.
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LBiQ: So how do you see the current state of play around distribution models for mobile gaming? I’ve heard you talk before and I know you’re a big believer in the opportunities available to games developers once users realise there’s more to the mobile web than simply operator portal decks.
KS: At the moment the mobile games market, like the mobile content market as a whole, is mimicking the way that the market for video games works across traditional, physical retail channels. You create a product, you ship this as a deployment to the retailers – in this case the network operators – and they then promote and launch it with slots and advertising spots on their portals. We may think of it as a digital business but, conceptually, it’s similar to the way that things work in the real world. Right now, we’re seeing the mobile internet follow very much the same pattern
that the web did a decade ago. Users are realising that there’s more to browsing on their phones than just the operator portals. Device and interface technologies are improving, the cost of browsing is more affordable and there’s starting to be more content out there. For games publishers who don’t have the deals to make it onto the portals, the last few years haven’t always been easy; you’ve had high customer acquisition costs because you’ve been trying to attract customers without advertising on the operator decks, and you’ve had the cost of processing mobile
“It’s like having a Wal-Mart and saying only a quarter of people can shop there.” 37